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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24985447">you can never step into the same not going home again twice</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/greatunironic/pseuds/greatunironic'>greatunironic</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>IT (Movies - Muschietti)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eddie/Patty Brotp, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:01:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>29,822</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24985447</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/greatunironic/pseuds/greatunironic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"This is a ghost story; but more importantly it is also a story about devotion." In which roles are reversed + Eddie struggles in the aftermath.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>83</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. i like to think that somewhere out there</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <span class="small"> - written for the reddie big bang; art forthcoming!</span>
  <br/>
  <span class="small"> - title from the bob hicok poem of the same name</span>
</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Oh baby<br/>
Lean into me<br/>
There’s always a side door<br/>
Into the dark<br/>
— LCD Soundsystem, “Oh Baby”</p>
</blockquote><p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>Before we start, I should tell you: the story you are about to hear is a ghost story. It is a story about the things that haunt us, a story about the hurt things inside us, that prick us with their jagged, broken edges and keep us awake at night, frightened of the dark. It is a story about horror and pain and regret.</p><p>But, perhaps more importantly, this is also a story about devotion.</p><p> </p><p>In the aftermath of it all, the five of them giddy but shell-shocked and not quite comprehending what was going to come next — <em>hiding a body, getting stories straight, and lying, </em>Eddie thought, <em>just a whole bunch of lying, what the fuck, what the </em>fuck — he found himself in Richie’s room, unable to get past the threshold of the doorway. His bag was torn open on the bed, shirts everywhere, and Eddie could see a pool of blood on the bathroom floor, beginning to creep towards where shitty linoleum met ugly carpet. Numb but beginning to shake, the adrenaline of the last few days finally beginning to slip away, he’d walked to the side of the bed, fingers brushing against the t-shirt at the top of it, for a band he’d never heard of, before Bill was calling his name, telling him to head toward Ben’s room for a group meeting. Eddie had zipped the duffle shut, put it over his shoulder, and gone to meet the others. </p><p>It was only much later, sitting on the bed in the Roxy Hotel suite he was going to be calling home while the divorce lawyers figured everything out, did Eddie realize he had the duffle with him still, tucked in with the rest of his luggage in the corner. He sat on the floor with it, opening it up to inventory the contents one by one, unfolding and refolding the tees from shitty bands, the horrible button-downs, a single pair of dark-wash jeans, a sport’s coat. He laid out in neat rows on the fine wooden floor boards: the loose toothbrush, a spare pair of glasses, old ticket stubs and boarding passes, the cracked leather wallet and a set of keys on a talking Bob Ross keychain — lines of little stupid things, useless things — the only parts of Richie that Eddie had been able to save from Maine. </p><p>He stared at the keys in his hand, pressing buttons and listening to Bob Ross tinnily tell him about happy little trees, and he felt like his lungs were frozen, unable to catch a breath. He went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, took an Ativan, and stared at his reflection in the mirror. He kept expecting to see Bowers over his shoulder, grinning.</p><p><em> Fucking, </em>he thought, and didn’t know what he meant, hands trembling against the proceline sink. He stared at the bottles of pills lining the sink like little soldiers. He wanted to dump them down the toilet. He wanted to sweep them off the edges and forget about them. He wanted to take another Ativan.</p><p>He’d gotten the ball rolling on his divorce back at the New Hampshire border, on speakerphone with a colleague who’d been through a messy divorce a few years ago and asking for the name of the woman who’d repped him. He’d told the guy, George, that a childhood friend had died and he’d gone back to the funeral — which the office all knew — and added that another friend had gone missing while they were there.</p><p>George had said, “Oh, shit, Eddie. Maine, you said? Was that — Richard Tozier? The comedian? There was a thing on Seth Meyers about his disappearance.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Eddie had said. “Yeah, and I guess it all got me thinking, about, fucking — you know. Everything. My whole fucking life.”</p><p>“Yeah, man, I know,” said George, who really didn’t given that his divorce was precipitated by a series of increasingly brazen affairs, not an exsistential crisis and supernatural fucking <em> clown </em> but Eddie wasn’t going to mention it. “Listen, I’ll talk to Herb. You’ve got a lot of PTO, and you haven’t scheduled anything else for the year, so you take the time you need, to get things settled with Myra and, you know, yourself.”</p><p>“Thanks,” he’d said, and George had said <em> you're welcome </em> and they’d hung up.</p><p>But in the hotel, staring at himself in the mirror, looking over his shoulder’s reflection to Richie’s house keys, set away from everything else on the floor, he didn’t think he knew what he’d meant on the phone. What did he want? What had he ever wanted?</p><p>Myra hadn’t even put up a fight when the papers were served, Eddie already set up in his hotel. His lawyer, a petite woman named Denise with a razor sharp bob and who always had a very large Starbucks in her hand, had said this would be an impressively straightforward divorce. Myra would take the majority of the physical assets, and Eddie would take the majority of what was liquid, as equal a division as could be. “Practically bloodless,” she’d said at their first meeting, watching him stare out her office window, and told him to give her compliments to whomever had drawn up his prenup</p><p>“I’d be curious, though,” she had said at the end of that meeting, stacking her papers up and going to shake his hand, “as to why? Most of my clients are much more, well, messy, compared to you, Mr. Kaspbrak. If there’s something around the corner, it <em> would </em> be best I know.”</p><p>It was what Myra wanted to know too. She asked it, in the one meeting they had with the lawyers, three days after Eddie lined up Richie’s life on his hotel floor and couldn’t bring himself to pack it back up, sitting across the table from each other, wanting to know why he would do this — if there was someone else.</p><p>He told Myra and Denise the same thing, the thing he’d told George, the thing they’d all agreed on in that hotel room in Maine: A close childhood friend had died unexpectedly. A series of murders had started up again in their hometown. Then another friend had gone missing. And it had made him think about his life, and he’d realized things about himself that he had repressed for years.</p><p>He was thinking of Richie at the end, in the dark, below, as he told them, “I didn’t cheat. I wouldn’t have.”</p><p>He was thinking, <em> I have to tell you — no it’s okay I’ll be right back </em> — and of Ben’s hand on his shoulders, pulling; Bev’s soft voice — <em> honey </em>— as Myra asked, “So why?” </p><p>He was thinking of the toothbrush on the hotel floor, the Bob Ross keychain in his pocket, of how there was never going to be a later for them — coming back later was always too late — of the letter that had been waiting for him with Stan’s name signed at the end when he said, “I’m gay.”</p><p>And, here, then, now: the lie, to all three of them, as he said, “There wasn’t anyone else,” before adding, “I just — I couldn’t be unhappy anymore, like this.” </p><p>Denise had nodded, blunt edge of her hair moving like a knife. “Good for you.”</p><p>Myra said, “Oh,” and didn’t look at him again, her eyes on her fingers as they wound together, interlocking, tight. She wasn’t wearing her wedding band or engagement ring. Eddie wondered what she did with them. He couldn’t remember where his band was; he thought, as the meeting continued on around them, assets dividing, lives diverging, <em> It doesn’t matter. </em></p><p>Eddie went back to his hotel room, looked at Richie’s things still on his floor, and called his boss.</p><p>He said, “I was thinking, do you know if they have any openings in the LA office?”</p><p>“You know,” said Herb, “I think they might.”</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>Eddie didn’t so much break into Richie’s house as he did just sort of let himself in. He had his keys after all, tucked into his pocket. He didn’t need his own anymore: he was still living out of hotels, the Roxy in Tribeca exchanged for the Ambrose in Santa Monica, and Myra had gotten the house. He’d sold his car and decided against a rental, taking Lyfts when he needed to get around. The new office was more laid back than New York, telling him to take his time to settle into Los Angeles, letting him telecommute in from his suite most days, occasionally coming into the office for a meeting here and there. The woman who ran the LA offices, a California native who kept a Peloton bike in her offices and occasionally took conference calls while riding it, had told him Herb had said such wonderful things about him.</p><p>“I trust Herb,” Laura said, with her wide, warm smile, on the first day they met. “And I looked over the accounts you handled over there — frankly, you keep up that level of work over here, you could come into the office once a month wearing Lululemon leggings and Crocs and I’d still let you have a corner office if you asked. Anyway, Eddie — have you found a place yet? Did you need a realtor? I have a great one. Let me get your Brian’s card.”</p><p>So for a month now, he spent his days looking over new accounts from the balcony of his hotel room, going into the office once a week to meet with new clients, and searching for an apartment with Laura’s recommended realtor.</p><p>He found himself on Richie’s doorstep after an afternoon of looking at West Hollywood apartments with Brian. They’d parted ways at the last place, Brian stepping into his car as Eddie told him he’d think about the places today and pulled out his phone to start calling a Lyft to pick him up, absently putting in an address. He hadn’t even realized he’d put in Richie’s house instead of his hotel until he was walking up the steps, pulling the keys out as he went.</p><p>Richie lived not especially far from Griffith Park, in a small house tucked off a winding curve that led further up into the Hills. Eddie wondered when he got it: the little he knew of Richie’s life before, gleaned from tabloids and Wikipedia after the fact, he’d moved to LA at eighteen, eschewing college in favor of the improv scene at Groundlings. He’d worked his way up, getting hired as a writer for SNL in his late twenties and moving to New York for a few years, before returning to LA and his stand up career and gigs writing for TV.</p><p>Eddie wondered if, in those few years, they’d ever crossed paths. He tried to imagine Richie on the subway, commuting from Brooklyn — because of course Richie would have lived in Brooklyn, he probably had been living in Bushwick before it was cool, rode the goddamn M — playing games on his phone, big legs tucked awkwardly against the seats, or maybe standing, leaning against the doors and ducking out of people’s way.</p><p>Eddie never rode the subway. He drove himself, or took cabs. He never liked the thought of being trapped underground, stuck down there in the dark —</p><p>He dug his nails into his palms.</p><p><em> Stop, </em> he told himself.</p><p>He looked around Richie’s house.</p><p>His house was nice, terribly small and a little cramped, a narrow stretch of living room and kitchen that opened up to a long porch that overlooked a sunken yard below. But it was full of personality and warmth, photographs and framed playbills, endless movies in the media console and books piled haphazardly across all surfaces, in every room. Eddie ran his fingers along the spines, looking at the titles — sci-fi novels and historical fiction and biographies and books about writing, books about acting. Richie had always been so much smarter than he’d wanted people to believe, at the top of their classes back than without ever trying.</p><p>Eddie walked room from room, like a tourist, watching the spaces left empty for Richie that he would never fill again. The life that he had, that Eddie didn’t know or understand, so far removed from the type of world Eddie had created for himself. He would only be able to look at it as he was now, as if peering through a window.</p><p>It made something ache in him, looking through the bits of Richie he’d left behind in the house, reminders of the boy he was and the man that Eddie never knew, not really. It was messy and disastrous, unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink, butter uncovered on the counter, a copy of <em> Contact </em> upturned next to it, like Richie stepped away in the middle of reading to go do something else and he would be right back.</p><p>They’d all lived out of each other’s pockets back then, that summer and after, until they’d splintered apart like dandelions in the breeze. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. That wasn’t what other children got, he thought. They were supposed to grow up with each other, but they were robbed and now Eddie was this person, without.</p><p><em> Stop, </em> he told himself again.</p><p>In the living room, there was a cluster of photographs on the wall above the sofa. Some had Richie in them, at various ages, with people Eddie vaguely recognized and assumed must be famous. There was a great one of Richie, maybe in his mid-twenties, next to Bill Murray in a bar somewhere. Richie looked like he had ascended to another plane of being, he was so happy.</p><p>Eddie climbed onto the sofa and leaned against the back of it, to look closer at the photos of the people who got to share their lives with him.</p><p>Most of the more recent photos of Richie also had an objectively stunning blonde white woman, some ten years younger than Richie it looked like, in them. Depending on the location of the picture, she was alternatively loaded for bear or dressed like someone’s dirtbag ex-boyfriend, carefully messy hair and Weird Al style wire frame glasses. She looked like she was fun, always laughing with Richie about something or flipping him the bird, regardless if they were at some fancy party or not. The one Eddie liked best was of them playing video games on the very sofa Eddie was knelt on, screaming at each other. Occasionally, the pictures of Richie and the beautiful blonde were joined by an equally beautiful, olive skinned man who looked huge in comparison to them, tall and wild looking. </p><p>Richie even had photos of the two of them by themselves, not on the wall but in small frames on the side table by the sofa: the woman getting her hair done and flipping off the cameraman; the man in a Winnipeg Jets hoodie, crouched behind metal letters that spelled out <em> fight me, </em>throwing up devil horns and grinning; the two of them smiling at each other like they were the only people in the world, her in a white sundress, him in a well-cut suit.</p><p>These people, he thought, must be Richie’s best friends, here, in LA. He wondered if Richie had told them where he was going; he wondered if they were worried for him.</p><p>There was a picture of Richie and his dad on the side table, near the photos with the beautiful strangers. They were both dressed in suits, him and his dad, Richie holding up an award of some kind, his arm slung over his father’s shoulder. Wentworth looked so much older, hair gone totally silver. He was still alive, Eddie thought, the only parent of their group who was — when Maggie had passed away when they were sixteen, Wentworth had packed his son up and moved them to Chicago. Eddie remembered, now, being on the porch of his old house, clinging to Rich and crying, begging him not to forget him.</p><p>He’d loved Richie, he thought with sudden bright clarity, with even more of himself, and for a lot longer, than he’d begun to scratch the surface of when they were in Derry and the memories had started to return. And Richie —</p><p>Eddie rang his fingers across the frame. Should he look for Wentworth’s number? Was he still in Chicago? How hard would it be to find it? But the police, he figured, were probably already in touch.</p><p>He pictured Wentworth as the picture showed him now, sitting on a sofa not unlike the one Eddie was on, his head in his hands, fingers gripping his silver hair, wondering when his son would come home.</p><p>Richie had been missing to the world for eight weeks and it wouldn’t be much longer before they pronounced him dead, Eddie knew. Derry PD had called the staties in, right after they’d given their statements and promised to make themselves available for further questioning, but there was enough blood from Bowers stabbing Richie in the bathroom and other circumstantial evidence that would lead them to conclude that Bowers had murdered Richie. And once they found Bowers at the mouth of the sewers, where they’d dragged him, once they had his body with the knife that stabbed Richie —</p><p>It would be over. Richie would be gone, truly gone, and Eddie would no longer be alone in his grief. The rest of the world would be right there with him.</p><p>Eddie wanted to press his face into a pillow and scream until his lungs gave out.</p><p>He ghosted around Richie’s house, the quality of light in the house shifting from bright day to dusk. He had to turn the lights on, here and there, as he moved, descending through the house, to a bottom level with a bedroom, a cluttered office, and an exceptionally small bathroom. He opened and closed cabinets, cataloging the contents mentally, running his fingers across the dust that was building up in the absence of a person.</p><p>Eventually, he found himself with only the bedroom left to explore, French doors there opening up to the sunken yard he glimpsed from the top.</p><p>He’d run to Derry directly from a tour, Eddie knew, but had still managed to leave behind this messy house. The bedroom was the same as the rest of it, his bed unmade, drawers open, closet door shut haphazardly, the sleeve of a button-down caught in it, reaching out.</p><p>He thought about Richie’s duffle bag, back at the hotel and still tucked between Eddie’s matching matte black Rimowa suitcases like their red-headed step-brother. He could bring it to the house, empty its insides into those half-empty drawers, could put back every last shitty band tee. Maybe if he brought it all back, maybe if he put it all back together again — maybe if putting back the t-shirts and the one pair of jeans and the sportcoat and the loose toothbrush meant filling all those holes he kept finding inside himself — maybe if he filled the drawers like he was filling all the parts of him that had always rattled like a ziploc bag full of pill bottles, wide and menacing and gaping —</p><p>Maybe then he’d put Richie to rest. </p><p>Maybe then he’d be able to let him go.</p><p>Eddie shut the drawers of the dresser one by one and then he curled up in the center of Richie’s unmade bed, pushed his face into the soft mattress and breathed. It smelled cold and like linen and something herby, and a little like dust. Was this what Richie had smelled like? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t fucking <em> remember. </em> </p><p>He rolled into his back. He reached down, grasped the edge of the duvet, and pulled it up, dragging blankets over his legs and chest and face until he was buried under them, in the dark, under the dust and the linen and the rosemary and thyme and the cold.</p><p><em> Stop, </em>he told himself, but, again and again, he couldn’t.</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>Sometime around one am, Eddie got out of bed.</p><p>He should go back to his hotel. He should be looking at the pictures on his phone of the apartments he went to that afternoon. He should work.</p><p>Instead, he found himself digging around under the sink in Richie’s tiny bathroom, pulling out cleaning supplies as he waited for the UberEats he’d ordered to arrive.</p><p>Because Richie was a fucking parody of himself, Eddie thought, the only things in the kitchen besides a stack of well-worn take-out menus and the uncovered butter were approximately twelve hundred packets of ramen and three frozen pizzas, all passed expiration. He spent a solid minute actually considering the ramen until he realized that was insane, he wasn’t twenty-one anymore, and started rifling through the menus.</p><p>He pawed through the stack, each with writing and highlights here and there, and picked one at random, a diner nearby that was still open. He ordered one of the options Richie had highlighted at some point, “no huevos” rancheros, and he tried to think about what Richie had eaten at the Jade of the Orient that night. He thought<em> , crab rangoons? </em>but couldn’t be sure. Like with so many other things, he didn’t know, just had those quick glimpses that would have to do, would have to do fucking forever now — maybe Eddie had the crab rangoons, maybe Richie was a vegetarian, maybe he just liked tofu, maybe this was someone else’s favorite order entirely. He didn’t know. He tried to stop caring.</p><p>He ordered coffee too, and hash browns, and cleaned the kitchen while he waited for his food.</p><p>Eddie cleaned. First, the kitchen, scrubbing away until the oven was spotless and you could eat out of the sink. Then he went to the living room, the front hall, even the porch, wiping up black ash that had settled from brush fires over the years; and then he went down the stairs, into the lower levels, and cleaned there too.</p><p>He scrubbed away at the bathroom until his knuckles were raw from soap and hot water. He washed the laundry piled up in a basket in the corner of the bedroom, folded it while watching movies from Richie’s collection, shitty comedies and Criterion Collection alike. He tidied up the office in between answering work emails on his phone and reading new updates in the Losers’ group chat, the one that Bill had created with a sort of manic efficiency before they’d bailed out of Maine. Bill mainly used it as a platform to tell them he loved them and remembered, at least once a day, sometimes twice. Bev and Ben sent a lot of selfies together to it — Ben also sent a lot of emoji laden messages which Eddie sometimes had trouble deciphering — while Mike liked to send them pictures of his travels, usually a lot of beautiful vistas, sunsets and sunrises and oceans and palm trees, and tell them about interactions he had with locals.</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>MIKE <em> 5.45am<br/>
</em>Lovely sunsets but why did no one tell me how racist this place is???</p>
  <p>BEN <em> 6.05am<br/>
</em>[grimace emoji] [gecko emoji] [palm tree emoji] [palm tree emoji] [palm tree emoji] [flower emoji]</p>
  <p>BEN <em> 6.05am<br/>
</em>Sorry buddy! You just seemed so excited! We didn’t want to ruin it!</p>
  <p>BEV <em> 6.11am<br/>
</em>lololololololol</p>
  <p>BEV <em> 6.11am<br/>
</em>i’ll post your bond, just lemme know</p>
  <p>BILL <em> 6.45am<br/>
</em>Yeah, sorry, Mike, it’s Trump country down there. You should come to LA next! </p>
  <p>BILL <em> 6.46am<br/>
</em>Eddie’s here! </p>
  <p>BILL <em> 6.46am<br/>
</em>And I’ll be back soon!!</p>
  <p>BILL <em> 6.47am<br/>
</em>We’ve got acai bowls + 100% less humidity</p>
</blockquote><p>Eddie rarely started conversations in the group himself, usually only just commenting on the others' pictures. He had, however, used it right at the beginning to tell them that he was gay, had divorced his wife, and was moving to California, all in one brisk text. Bev had replied to that one, <em> and that’s that on that, </em>which Eddie had appreciated. Mike had said he was proud of him, Bill offered his guest room, and Ben had sent along seven heart emojis and a fist bump.</p><p>But as he didn’t particularly want to get inundated with phone calls and direct messages as to his emotional state at this juncture in time — <em> fucked, </em> he thought, but at least he was self-aware about it — Eddie shot off a quick addition to the group — this time: <em> LA is marginally less of a nightmare than Florida </em> — and turned his attention to another cleaning project.</p><p>He didn’t leave the apartment. He couldn’t bring himself to, he supposed, finding himself existing peacefully alongside his trauma and ghosts. He could order food, Ubereats and Seamless alike, and worked easily from both his phone and Richie’s password-free computer (<em> because of fucking course, Richie, </em> he would think whenever he booted it up) in between cleaning projects and Richie’s enourmous movie collection.</p><p>He wondered about the sickness inside himself, this pain, this sadness. He wondered if this is what his mother had wanted to keep him cloistered from: love that would become heartbreak, love that would never have a chance. He wondered if the sickness had taken root and he would never be cured. He wondered if grief was terminal, if he was still back there too, if perhaps he had never truly left and this, this was all just —</p><p>He wondered, lying on Richie’s couch, the flickering lights of a Wes Anderson movie illuminating the living room, when it would start counting as squatting.</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>As he slept in his bed, at odd hours and sometimes not for very long, Eddie dreamed of Richie: sometimes they were nightmares — the darkness, beneath, Richie’s blood on his hands, in his mouth, their eyes wide in the black.</p><p>But some, though — some were good: Richie’s hand in his as they walked the winding streets around the house, his laughter from another room, the warm-linen-herb smell of him first thing in the morning as he said, “You sleep in, I’m going to walk the dog.”</p><p>Sometimes, it was harder to wake up than it was to fall asleep.</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>On the fourth day, Eddie couldn’t fucking stand himself. He’d cleaned everything at least three times, was steadily making his way through the stack of take out menus, and, if he was being brutally honest, it was getting to <em> Brokeback </em> levels of bullshit at this point. Because if he was going to have a a tragic gay awakening at forty, he thought, in a voice that sounded not unlike Richie, he was going to do it right.</p><p>He’d been walking around in his briefs and a deeply ancient LL Bean flannel that Richie had left haphazardly tossed over the back of his office chair for the better part of the last three days, like a fucked up Miss Havershim. It still smelled of Richie’s fancy cologne, woodsage and sea salt, a bottle of Jo Malone that looked out of place on Richie’s messy dresser, that Eddie spent far too long staring at, trying to decide if it had been a gift he wore on occasion or if Richie was the kind of person who bought high-end colognes for himself but still shopped for soap at his local CVS. Trying to recall what lingered on the sheets, in his dreams. Trying to remember if that’s what he’d smelled like before, back there.</p><p>He thought about returning to his hotel room, but decided to head up to Bill’s instead. It was just up the street from Richie’s, a gentle ten minute walk, something which Bill had disclosed there at the end while they’d been deciding what story to tell the cops, huddled in Ben’s rooms at the townhouse. Bill had been holding Richie’s wallet, peering at his driver’s license and near tears, angry and confused because they had been so fucking close and still so far away. He was in Europe when Eddie had texted him to tell him he had gotten transferred to the LA office but he’d given Eddie clear instructions on how to find the hide-a-key to his house — it was in the rain gutter above the back porch, because what was it gonna do, Eddie? Rain and wash it away? It was <em> Los Angeles </em> — and directions to the guest bedroom that was Eddie’s as long as he wanted it. (Or until Audra got too weirded out by their codependent sadness, Eddie had wanted to say at the end of that particular conversation but did not.)</p><p>The guest bedroom was nice, impersonal and chic, like a hotel room. The walls were cream with black wainscoting, thick linen curtains that matched the walls blocking out the LA sun, and there were framed photos of Bill and Audra’s wedding day on a pale dresser; they looked happy but something about them reminded Eddie of stock photography. Almost immediately, he felt terrible for the thought: it wasn’t Bill’s fault that he had found the shape of the kind of happiness that Eddie had tried to force himself into for so long, like a square peg in a round hole, and that Bill still cared enough to find out a way to make it work.</p><p>Bill’s place had actual food, too, organic canned goods and dried pasta in the pantry. There were even loaves of organic bread in the freezer. He wondered, making himself some toast at three in the afternoon, if Bill had arranged to have someone come by and fill the cabinets, or if he and Audra were just the kind of people who always made sure they had on hand what they might possibly need.</p><p>Eddie ate his toast and then went back to the guest room, where he lay back on the impeccably made bed, curling into himself like a pill-bug.</p><p>Richie’s bed, he thought, was much more comfortable.</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>After making the call to stay there, he had resolved that staying at Bill’s would be a temporary thing  — Brian was a genuinely good realtor, after all, and Eddie knew he would eventually find him the perfect place. Hell, the last place he’d seen before he ended up haunting Richie’s house like a particularly pathetic ghost had been everything he wanted in a new place. </p><p>He just couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger on anything, to make anything permanent, to make anything real, so instead he tucked his suitcases and Richie’s duffle bag into the back of the closet in Bill’s guestroom, and moved through each day into the next. Put one foot in front of the other, and thought, <em> This is enough, this is fine. </em></p><p>Eventually, Bill and Audra got back to LA from their press tour. It was a Tuesday, around lunch time, ten weeks after Richie and Stan died. Eddie was sitting in their kitchen, filling out a spreadsheet on a new client, drinking the coffee he bought to replace the bag he’d finished a few days ago, when the front door opened and a woman said, “Bill, you cheap fucker, you need to tip him more than that!”</p><p>“No I don’t!” denied Bill. “He took way too long to get us back.”</p><p>“Bill,” said the woman, obviously Audra, “it’s LA. We’re going from LAX to the Hills. It takes one thousand years. It will always take one thousand years. That’s how this town works.”</p><p>There was a brief silence, and then Audra said, “If the phrase “surface road” comes out of your mouth right now —”</p><p>“I’m just saying, he should have done a different route,” he argued. “We did not need to take the 405 all the way. We should have done Sepulveda and —”</p><p>Eddie sipped his coffee and listened as they dragged their suitcase further through the house. He wondered if he should let them know he was here.</p><p>“Oh my God, I’ll kill you,” Audra was saying. “I will genuinely kill you if you make me have this argument any longer. Just tip him, give him four stars, and don’t negatively impact some poor man’s second job, you capitalist fucking hack. Hey, is Eddie here or is he at work?”</p><p>“Eddie!” Bill called. “Hey, man, you here? Or are you at work?”</p><p>Audra muttered something that he only vaguely heard  — “nailed it, asshole,” he thought — and Eddie snorted before shouting back, “Yeah, in the kitchen!”</p><p>A few seconds later, Bill walked into the kitchen and immediately grabbed Eddie around the shoulders from behind in a hug, not waiting for him to get up or even stop typing or put his goddamn coffee down, shaking him and his fucking chair back and forth as he held him.</p><p>“Bill, buddy, I love you, but <em> I’ll </em> fucking kill you if you make me spill this coffee on my laptop,” he said. “Let go of me, you idiot.”</p><p>“Aw, yes,” said Audra, bustling over to the fridge to get herself a glass of water. “Bill, it’s official. Every one of your childhood friends is dedicated to roasting you within an inch of your life, and I love it.”</p><p>Bill, to his credit, laughed as he said, “Everyone picks on me and is mean to me, even my beautiful wife, and I don’t like it.”</p><p>“From the bottom of my heart,” said Eddie, “you deserve this and I’m thrilled it’s happening. We were too nice to you as a child because you were sad and tragic so we have to make up for lost time.”</p><p>“Rude,” said Bill, finally letting go of him and dropping down into the chair across from Eddie. He was still smiling though, watching as Audra hopped up to sit on the kitchen counter. </p><p>“Whatever,” he said. “How was your flight?”</p><p>“Fine,” Bill told him. “I mean, exhausting but fine. I miss peanuts. Peanuts were the only good thing about flying.”</p><p>“We flew first class and you had an omelette, and you said it was the best thing that ever happened to flying,” Audra said.</p><p>“You had airplane eggs?” demanded Eddie. “What, do you have nothing better to do than get food poisoning?</p><p>“Oh, God,” he said, putting his head down on the table as Audra laughed and Eddie launched into a food safety rant, for old time’s sake, he thought, if nothing else.</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>That night, they ordered from some fancy restaurant down in Little Armenia that Bill swore had the best chicken he’d ever had in his life, and Eddie and Audra talked smack about Bill for basically the entire evening, as Bill drank beer and got progressively redder in the face. As the evening went on, Eddie decided he liked Audra quite a bit, and felt bad about judging their relationship before: she was funny and warm and took absolutely zero shit from Bill, and Eddie was glad that Bill hadn’t used Derry and the past to implode his marriage like he could have — like Eddie had successfully done.</p><p>It was different, of course, so different, because of the things that Eddie found inside himself in Derry and the things he’d had to leave behind there too.</p><p>He dug his fingers into his palms.</p><p>Audra was getting up from the table, announcing that she had an audition tomorrow and wanted to go over the sides in the office before she went to bed. She walked over to Bill, who tilted his head back as she ran a hand through his hair, and she kissed his cheek.</p><p>“You guys should go out back,” she suggested. “It’s nice out.”</p><p>She said goodnight to them and retreated to the office.</p><p>Eddie and Bill grabbed their beers and followed her advice, sitting on the nice lounge chairs that were lined up on the porch, watching the sun slowly set behind the trees that hid Bill’s backyard from prying eyes.</p><p>“She knows everything,” Bill said, after a moment.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Audra,” he said.</p><p>Eddie glared. “Uh, of course, Audra, Bill, that’s not what I fucking meant.”</p><p>“I told her everything, Eddie,” he said. “How could I not? I just — I ran away in the middle of the fucking night, b-basically. Just fucking b-bailed. Didn’t say anything, didn’t call, didn’t text. I think she th-thought I was going to hurt m-myself or something. And I did such fucking st-stupid <em> shit </em> there. I could have — we lost Stan. We lost Rich. And I could have. So when I g-got back, I just. I told her everything.”</p><p>“How’d that go?” he asked.</p><p>“Poorly,” Bill laughed. “F-f-fucking <em> shittily, </em>man. The cops got called to our hotel in London, they th-thought we were having a domestic at one point. It was b-bad. She threatened to have me committed, she thought I’d really lost it. But I got Mike on the phone, and then Bev too, and eventually she just — I mean, she didn’t just, it took twelve hours but she eventually believed me. And I’m so lucky that she did. I mean, can’t exactly t-talk about this with a therapist, right?”</p><p>“Right,” said Eddie. “You’re lucky.”</p><p>“I mean.” His mouth twisted with a wry kind of smile. “I guess you could say that f-f-f-fucking clown saved my marriage.”</p><p>“That’s cool,” said Eddie. “It definitely ended mine.”</p><p>Bill snorted and immediately sobered. “How are you doing, Eddie? Down there —”</p><p>He didn’t let him finish. “I know. I’m — I’m divorced. And here. I’m here.”</p><p>“Yeah.” Bill reached out his hand and took the one that Eddie wasn’t holding his beer in. He squeezed Eddie’s fingers and held on, letting their clasped hands hang between them. “We’re here.”</p><p><br/>
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</p><p>Eddie woke up at six the next morning. He’d finally managed to get himself back on a normal schedule, or as normal as could be when he still found himself shaking awake every other night with alternating dreams of darkness and damp and impossible happiness, of Richie’s voice over and over again, grasping for pills he was refusing to let himself take.</p><p>He woke at six am during the week, would work out either by going for a run and testing the new found strength of his lungs or by doing body weight exercises in the bedroom, then answer emails and work until noon. Sometimes, after lunch, he would head into the office and work there. Most of the time he stayed at Bill and Audra’s, working in the kitchen or the living room or out back. He fought the urge to return to Richie’s. He suspected that if he did, he’d never leave again.</p><p>Audra was in the kitchen when Eddie went to grab a cup of coffee before his work out.</p><p>“Hey,” she said. “I thought you’d still be sleeping like Bill. You guys had a late one.”</p><p>“I’ve always been an early riser,” he told her. </p><p>She nodded and handed him a cup of coffee from the pot she just brewed. “This is good, by the way. Thanks for getting it.”</p><p>“Well, I drank everything else. It was only polite.”</p><p>“Still,” she said. “Thanks anyway. Were you about to go for a run or something?”</p><p>Eddie looked down at his running shoes, his bare shins, and then looked back at Audra. She was also wearing sneakers and leggings. “Yeah. You too?”</p><p>“Yep,” she said. “Have you done any of the trails around here or do you just run on the street?”</p><p>“Street,” he said.</p><p>Audra downed her coffee. “C’mon. I’ll take you up to the park.”</p><p>He finished his mug too and found himself following her out of the house, walking up the street to the entrance of Griffith Park, where they took off together in silence, jogging up the path and deeper into the park.</p><p>An hour later, Audra led him out near where they’d started, pulling him by the hand towards a little building amongst the trees. <em> Trails </em> , a wooden sign with bright yellow writing said, <em> pies, sodas, coffee. </em> He’d seen the steps heading up towards it when they’d arrived, hadn’t been quite close enough to see what it said, and had thought maybe it was a public restroom.</p><p>“The sandwiches here are great,” Audra told him as they walked up. “Coffee’s good too.”</p><p>Eddie nodded.</p><p>A group of teenage girls at one of the park tables kept cutting their eyes to Audra, brows furrowed, as the two of them waited in line. Audra stared up at the board, deciding what to order, unaware, but Eddie felt their eyes on them, making something tighten between his shoulders.</p><p>“It’s fine,” she said suddenly.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>She elbowed him gently in the side. “They think I’m someone but they don’t know. They won’t come up to us. People always think I’m the chick from <em> Glee, </em> you know, the one teacher? So if they do come up, they’ll ask if I’m her, and I’ll say no, and they’ll leave. Don’t worry.”</p><p>“Oh,” he said. “Sorry?”</p><p>Audra laughed. “I mean, yeah, it’d be nice if they knew who I was. But who gives a shit?”</p><p>They ordered two coffees and sandwiches — the PB and J for Audra, and avocado on gluten-free bread for Eddie —  before heading to a set of chairs and a stump off to one side. They ate quietly for a little, people watching. Eddie glared at the teenagers once and they left shortly after. Audra snorted into her coffee.</p><p>“How are you?” she asked. “I mean, really?”</p><p>“I’m fine,” he said.</p><p>She looked at him.</p><p>“I’m not fine,” he said. “But I’m fine.”</p><p>“You know you can talk to me,” she said after a moment. “I know you know I know. About Derry. About — <em> it. </em>So you can talk to me. If you want. I’d be happy to listen for you too.”</p><p>“I really can’t,” Eddie said. He looked at his hands, in his lap. He was shredding his paper napkin into tiny, unrecognizable pieces. He thought about the dark. He could feel his heart in his throat again. No one knew what it was like. No one, not even the rest of them. This thing — it was Eddie’s alone to shoulder.</p><p>“It’s okay,” Audra said. She made a little abortive gesture with her hand, like she wanted to reach out to him but maybe thought better of it. “It’s okay. You all — you all went through hell, there. It’s okay.”</p><p>“It’s not. I can’t — Rich —”</p><p>He bit his lip so hard he thought he had maybe gone clean through it.</p><p>“Rich,” she echoed. “I wish I could have — he seemed like a great guy.”</p><p>He snorted. “He was a fucking asshole. But he was ours.”</p><p>“Bill said you guys are really close.”</p><p><em> Close isn’t the word for it </em>, Eddie wanted to tell her. He didn’t know then, and maybe he didn’t quite even know now, not the right word for it at least, except: everything. Richie was everything.</p><p>“Yeah,” he said, instead. “We were really close.”</p><p>“You miss him,” she said. She hesitated, and then said, “Bill said he thought — you don’t have to but, with me, but Bill said maybe —”</p><p>He felt like he’d been slapped. <em>Fucking</em> <em>Bill, </em>he thought. Fucking<em> Bill.</em></p><p>“I miss him,” he said, tight. “It’s fine.”</p><p>Audra stared at him, eyes wide. She said, “But not fine, right?”</p><p>“But not fine,” he agreed. He brushed the destroyed napkin onto the ground. He wanted to wash his hands. He wanted to clean something until his skin was raw. He wanted an inhaler. “Should we start heading back? You need to get ready, right?”</p><p>“Ugh,” she said. “Yeah. God, I wish I was famous enough not to have to audition anymore. I hate memorizing sides.”</p><p>They tossed their empty cups and walked back the way they had come that morning. A few times, Eddie could feel Audra’s eyes on him, heavy, sad. He ignored it.</p><p>Back at the house, Eddie started the coffee machine up while Audra went upstairs to get cleaned up. He answered a few emails and had had two more cups of coffee by the time she came back down, dressed and ready. They both pretended that the last few minutes of lunch didn’t happen.</p><p>“All right,” she said. “How do I look? Like someone’s shrew ex-girlfriend?”</p><p>Eddie looked her up and down. “Do you want to look like someone’s shrew ex-girlfriend?”</p><p>“That’s what I’m reading for,” she said.</p><p>“You look great,” he said.</p><p>“Thanks. Okay, I gotta go beat traffic. I should be back around the same time as Bill — he was saying something last night about getting In And Out maybe when he came to bed? He said you haven’t been yet.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Eddie said. </p><p>“Okay,” she said again. “If traffic’s not too shitty, we’ll go! I’ll see you later, Eddie.”</p><p>He waved her off and listened as Audra closed the front door, then to the faint sound of her turning on her little electric car and driving away. He got up, walked out of the kitchen and into the guest room — his room, at this point, he supposed — and sat down on the bed. He put his head in his hands.</p><p><em> Richie, </em> he thought. <em> Richie </em> —</p><p>Why did you go when you did?</p><p>Back there, back there, in the darkness, <em> Richie — </em></p><p>“I have to tell you,” he’d said.</p><p>“No,” Eddie had told him. “Save your breath. It’s okay. I’ll be right back. It’s okay.”</p><p><em> Fucking coward, </em> he said to himself. <em> You little fucking coward. </em></p><p>He pulled the pillow over, put it over his face, and screamed.</p><p><br/>
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</p><p>That night, he dreamed about Stan.</p><p>Eddie was at the end of a boardwalk, forearms pressed into wooden railings hard enough to hurt, leaning over and staring out into the horizon. He could feel the warmth of another body next to him, not touching but so, so close.</p><p>Dream logic told him he was at the Santa Monica Pier, though he’d never been, and dream logic told him the man at his side was Stan.</p><p>He turned to look at Stan, breath caught in his throat: he’d never seen grown-up Stan before, hadn’t been able to bring himself to Google his obit, couldn’t even call Patty like he knew Bev did sometimes. But in the dream, it was grown-up Stan all the same, looking out over the ocean too, the fine lines that splintered from the corners of his eyes, the light shadow of hair against the sharp cut of his jaw, his laugh lines, the wind moving his curly hair.</p><p><em> It’s you, </em> he thought, his arms aching, his lungs. Grief and longing, like immense waves, crashed over him. He thought, <em> Oh, oh, it’s you. </em></p><p>Stan turned from watching the horizon line, just his head, turning to make eye contact with Eddie. </p><p>He smiled.</p><p><em> I miss you, </em> Eddie wanted to say. <em> I’m sorry </em> and <em> I miss you </em> and <em> I wished I’d known you </em> and <em> none of this, not any of it, has ever been fair. </em></p><p>He woke and stared at the ceiling until dawn, face growing tacky with tears.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. on a planet exactly like ours</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>Grief, now, is an animal that squats low in your belly, its teeth chewing into the softness of your insides, pulling, carving. It wants to hollow you out, bit by bit. It wants to eat your heart. It tears and tears until it has cleared you out: until only the animal and its cold body, like a dead thing, remains. This animal, this wild, alien grief, calcifies. It builds a new skeleton in you. Some days, this skeleton is the only thing holding you up.</p><p>I wish there was another way to feel, but here, now, at this part of the story: I am sorry. There is only you, and the animal that is making its home in you.</p><p>
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</p><p>Eddie, in his core, was a New Yorker. He moved fast, he talked fast, he wanted to get shit done. He told it to you straight, rarely pulled punches, and tried not to care about what people thought of him, even though he cared so much. He was paranoid and mean and typically liked nature from a safe distance. (As it transpired, many of his childhood and grown-up allergies alike were fake; many, except for the pollen related ones. Fuck flowers, and fuck spring.)</p><p>So if a year ago you had sat Eddie down and told him he was going to uproot twenty-odd years of bred to the bone New Yorker and ship it off to L-fucking-A? And that he would actually start to embrace the laid back pace and warm smiles and Hollywood glamour? That he would become a disciple of the avocado and almond milk and the barre classes his childhood best friend Bill’s wife would drag him to? That he would own <em> sandals </em> and regularly go to the beach? He would have laughed in your face.</p><p>But here he was: eating avocado toast for lunch most days, wearing his fucking sandals to the fucking office because that was <em> normal here, </em> and taking his time from one day to the next.</p><p>Here he was: four months after Derry, four months after Richie was declared missing but they knew where he was, four months after the fortune cookies told them about Stan.</p><p>He dreamed about Richie almost every night. In them, Richie died, over and over and over and all Eddie wanted to do was save him, protect him, let him get the fucking words out, let him tell him —</p><p>But there were other dreams, too, ones where they were happy, ones that felt so real, so much more true than the ones Eddie knew he actually lived. There was one where Richie woke him early in the morning to tell him he was taking the dog for a walk — he had that one a lot — and ones where Eddie ran up the trails to the observatory and Richie was always waiting for him at the end, at Trails. There were dreams about Sunday night dinners and walking over to Bill and Audra’s, the other Losers joining them where they were in town, a new ritual. He dreamed Richie wrote jokes about him and asked his permission before he said any of them aloud, and that they fought over what to watch, what to order for take out, what color to paint the bathroom.</p><p>He dreamed of Stan, on the boardwalk, his head turned just so, the corner of his mouth rising. He dreamed of Stan looking like he wanted to tell him something.</p><p>
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</p><p>It happened on a Thursday, around nine am.</p><p>Bill and Audra were in the living room, watching CNN. They were planning on going to the Getty; Bill had been talking about writing a novel about a cursed painting and wanted some inspiration, and Audra had always loved the sculpture garden so she’d been excited to spend the day there. They’d asked Eddie if he wanted to come too, but he had an appointment with his realtor that afternoon to check out a place in Brentwood Village.</p><p>He was flipping through pictures in the Zillow link Brian had sent, in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee, when he started to hear raised voices from the living room. In the two weeks he’d been living with Bill and Audra, he’d gotten quite good at ignoring the arguments they had approximately every fifteen minutes. They were usually over very little — traffic, who used the last of the toothpaste, Whole Foods vs Trader Joes, Ralphs vs Von’s, whose agent was the bigger asshole — and had vanishingly small lifespans. Eddie suspected they both just liked yelling. It made him nostalgic, and heartbroken.</p><p>He wasn’t sure what it was that had him putting his coffee down and walking into the living room, but he was stepping into the room just as Audra said, “I just think it’s ghoulish, Bill.”</p><p>Bill opened his mouth to say something, caught sight of Eddie, and snapped it shut. They stared at each other.</p><p>“What’s ghoulish?” asked Eddie. He didn’t think he wanted to know. He thought maybe he already did.</p><p>Audra looked over her shoulder at Eddie and frowned.</p><p>“What’s ghoulish?” he asked again.</p><p>“Uh,” said Bill, eyes darting around the room.</p><p>Eddie felt his jaw tighten. “What the fuck did you do?”</p><p>After a minute of Bill desperately looking anywhere other than at Eddie, Audra frowning at the TV now, and Eddie glaring, Bill burst out, “We have a story to keep st-st-straight!”</p><p>“Bill posted a picture on Instagram,” Audra said. “Of Richie.”</p><p>“What the fuck?” reapeated Eddie. “What the fuck?”</p><p>“Someone asked me on Twitter about him,” he said, miserable. “They found an old interview where I t-talked about growing up in M-M-Maine, in Derry, and they asked if I knew him.”</p><p>“What did you do?” He opened his little used Instagram app.</p><p>“What was I supposed to d-do?” Bill threw his hands in the air. “Of course I said I knew him! I’m not g-g-g-gonna lie about — about that. Eddie, I —”</p><p>The first picture on Eddie’s feed was from Ben — Bev, smiling, backlit by a radiant sun, the caption a series of heart emojis — and the next was from Bill — Richie, at the Jade of the Orient, arm wrestling with Eddie. His breath caught. He didn’t even know Bill had —</p><p>“Eddie, d-don’t —”</p><p><em> Rich Tozier and I grew up together, with five other friends, in Derry, Maine </em> , he’d written. <em> We were kids in a shitty, dead-end town, where horrible things happened, things I wish I didn’t have to remember, things I wish never happened to us, horrible things that still made us who we are, even if we wish they hadn’t. I wish things had been different. I wish we hadn’t fallen apart like we did, that the space between then and now was so much smaller. I wish he was here, I wish I knew where he was, because not a day goes by where we don’t think of you, where we go to call you or send you a picture or a joke we think you’d like, where we wait for your response in the group text. We love you, Richie, wherever you are </em> — <em> please come home soon. </em></p><p>Eddie’s phone dropped to the wood floor, bounced once, and rested there, face up, undamaged, whole. Richie, grinning at Eddie, laughing, Richie —</p><p>“What the fuck,” said Eddie. It sounded as if his voice was coming from somewhere far away, from outside himself. It was calm, which surprised him — he felt like he was burning up. It was strange that his voice wasn’t burning too. “What the fuck.”</p><p>“Eddie,” he said.</p><p>“You fucking know where he is, Bill,” he said, in a very reasonable tone. “You fucking know where he is, Bill. He’s in Derry, where you <em> made me fucking leave him.” </em></p><p>“Eddie.” Bill was standing up from the sofa, reaching for him. He was crying. </p><p>“He’s where you made me leave him,” he repeated. “He’s in the fucking <em> dark, </em> down <em> there, </em> in the cold, in that thing’s <em> home </em> , where <em> you </em> made <em> me </em> leave <em> him. </em> How can you say those things? How can you — what the fuck? What the fuck is wrong with you?”</p><p>“We have a,” he started.</p><p>“If you say we have a fucking story to stick to again,” said Eddie, “I’ll rip your fucking face off. I’ll fucking kill you, Bill, if you. You made me — <em> you made me. </em> I wanted to stay with him. I could have stayed with him! I should have stayed with him, I should have been there, we should have been there together, <em> we should be there together!” </em></p><p>“Eddie,” said Bill, going to take his arm. He pulled himself away, whole body jerking, like he’d been electrocuted. His shoulder slammed into the wall and Bill stared at him, wide-eyed, horrified.</p><p>He was crying too, Eddie realized, the tears tracking down his face and he was yelling now too, he thought. He couldn’t quite tell. It seemed like it was happening to someone else, this pain, like it wasn’t his. He was distantly aware of Audra on the couch, watching him, her hands tight around her phone. They were both staring at him like they were worried he was going to hurt himself.</p><p>“Why couldn’t you leave me there?” he demanded. “I wanted to stay. I wanted to be with him. He wanted to tell me — he was going to tell me and I didn’t fucking let him, and the least I could fucking do was stay there with him, so he wouldn’t have to be fucking alone! We left him alone down there! How could we do that to him? Why did you make me? I wanted — I wanted — why would you say, fucking, why would you —”</p><p>“Eddie, please,” said Bill. “I’m sorry, c-c-can you — can you sit with me? Come sit with me. Please. I’m — we n-n-n-need to sit down.”</p><p>“Fuck you, Bill,” he said, and turned on his heel and walked out the door.</p><p>
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</p><p>Three hours later, Eddie came back to himself. He was in a bookstore, but he wasn’t sure where the bookstore was— Silver Lake, maybe? No, Los Feliz, he thought. He was aware that he’d walked there, that he’d been walking the whole time since he’d left Bill’s, but he didn’t remember it, not really. He had his wallet in his pocket, his keys too, and his phone clutched tightly in his hand, so hard it hurt, and he didn’t remember picking that up either.</p><p>Bill had texted him seven times, and called him twice. Bev had called him too, and there was a message from Mike asking him to give him a call when he had a second. Ben had sent a series of heart emojis but nothing else. He wondered if Bill had texted them all to tell them what happened, or if they had just seen Bill’s post on Instagram and independently decided to check in. It honestly could go either way.</p><p>Eddie sent Ben a heart emoji in return, confident that his being alive would make its way to those who wanted to know, swiped away the alerts from the rest of the messages, and tucked his phone away, looking around the shop he’d stumbled into.</p><p>He couldn’t see anyone working there, and it was dusty and tiny and a lawsuit waiting to happen, books piled on shelves that were bending under their weight, narrow walkways between them. Books were stacked on the floor too, little towers that became their own rows. One spark, and, much like the rest of California, it’d go up like a tinderbox.</p><p>Eddie started down one dimly lit path, putting one foot in front of another. He felt curiously numb, burned out from the inside. Immolated.</p><p>He wanted his inhaler, longed for it. He wanted an Ativan too but they were all back at Bill’s. He didn’t think he’d be back there for a while.</p><p>For twenty minutes, he walked through the stacks, running his fingers against the dusty spines of the books. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He didn’t think he was looking for anything at all, really — what could make this better? There was nothing for him, not any more.</p><p>After he’d gone through every last row, he turned around and started back towards the entrance.</p><p>“Find what you were looking for?” a woman asked as his hand closed around the doorknob. He didn’t jump but it was a close thing.</p><p>Eddie looked over his shoulder.</p><p>There was a dark haired woman of indeterminate age sitting behind a register, her chin in her hands. Her very dark eyes seemed warm, and infinite. She smiled at him; she had an awful lot of teeth, he thought.</p><p>“I was just looking,” he told her.</p><p>“But what were you looking for?” she asked.</p><p>“I wasn't looking for anything. Just — looking.”</p><p>“Oh,” she said. She sat up from her slouch and moved her hand to slide a book across the counter at him. “You should try this then.”</p><p>He stepped forward. He wasn't sure why. “What is it?”</p><p>“Nothing,” she said, with her too many teeth smile. “It’s nothing. Because you were looking for nothing, right?”</p><p>“Right.” He picked the book up. There was nothing written on the spine, nothing written on the front. It looked more like someone’s journal than anything. <em> Nothing, </em> he thought. <em> Anything. </em></p><p>“Take it,” she said.</p><p>“How much?”</p><p>She waved her hand. “Don’t worry about it.”</p><p>“I,” Eddie said.</p><p>“Don’t worry about it,” she repeated. “It’s nothing.”</p><p>“Okay,” he said. He took a step back, book tucked under his arm.</p><p>“Let me know how you like it, though,” she said. “That's the price. You gotta come back and tell me what you thought of it, okay?”</p><p>“Sure,” he said. </p><p>“Bye,” said the dark haired woman. “See you again soon!”</p><p>Eddie nodded, reaching behind him for the door. “Bye,” he said, and left.</p><p>Outside, the sun was still shining. He wasn’t sure why he was surprised by that — it was California, after all, and it was only around noon. It just felt —</p><p>“Fucking Los Feliz,” he said quitely to himself, turning the book over in his hands as he walked away from the shop. He glanced over his shoulder at it, seeing a normal enough used bookstore in his wake, and nothing else. He looked back at the book, cracked it open: the first page read, <em> The Book of Ritual Magicks; Being an Historical Account of Occult Philosophy and Practise. </em></p><p>“What the fuck,” he said again. Fucking California. Fucking LA. He snapped it shut, tucked it back under his arm, and pulled his phone out to call a Lyft.</p><p>He had another message from Ben: a double heart emoji now, and two little kids holding hands.</p><p>
  <br/>
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</p><p>He wound up back at Richie’s in the end. He texted Brian to cancel the viewing, making up an excuse about work and not that he’d blacked out after a fight with his best friend and ended up in goddamn Loz Feliz.</p><p>He dropped the weird book on Richie’s sofa and kept walking. He made his way down to the bedroom, putting his phone on the dresser, intent on maybe taking a nap, but when he got there he realized someone was sitting on the bench under the willow tree in the corner of the sunken yard. It was a blonde woman, staring off into the distance, lost in thought.</p><p>“Oh, fuck,” he said.</p><p>Eddie glanced over his shoulder. He was wondering if he’d make it back to his phone on the dresser, and get the cops called before what was probably a crazy fan realized there was someone in the house when he looked back and saw that the blonde woman was already staring at him, rising from the bench. Also, he realized, he recognized her: blonde, beautiful, and wearing torn jeans, an oversized Winnipeg Jets sweatshirt, and a pair of aggressively ugly sneakers. She had on aviator-style eyeglasses and might have been taller than any woman he could remember seeing in real life.</p><p>Well, he thought. It looked like he was the one getting arrested for trespassing today. He went to grab his phone and then face the music.</p><p>“Hey!” the blonde called, her voice sharp and flat even through the porch doors. “Hey!”</p><p>Eddie hesitated for a moment but slid the door open and stepped out, walking a few paces forward. </p><p>The blonde met him halfway, eyeing him, immaculate eyebrows drawn together. She was taller up close, as tall as Richie had been. She frowned down at him and asked, in a flat accent, “Who the fuck are you?”</p><p>“Who the fuck are you?” he snapped back, wincing internally. He knew who she was: Richie’s beautiful blonde friend, the one who was objectively model gorgeous, the one who played video games with him on his couch, the one who probably missed him and worried after him and who didn’t even know.</p><p>She glared at him, reaching towards her back pocket — presumably for her phone and Eddie was beginning to resign himself to calling someone for bail money in a little bit, probably Bev or Ben, they wouldn’t ask questions — but stopped halfway through the motion. Her face cleared and she said, “Oh. Hey. You’re the guy with Rich in that picture William Denborough posted this morning.”</p><p>He clenched his jaw. “Yeah. That was me.”</p><p>The blonde nodded once, as if to herself. “Oh,” she said again. “You, um, you were with him, then. Right? At the reunion?”</p><p>“Uh.” Eddie blinked before he realized that a reunion must have been what Richie had told his friends — or at least this particular friend of his — he was going to when he went to Derry. “Uh, yeah. I was. I’m Eddie. Richie and I grew up together, with Bill.” </p><p>“Huh,” she said. She looked him up and down again. “Oh. This explains a few things about Rich’s exes.”</p><p>Eddie glared. “What the fuck is that supposed to fucking mean?”</p><p>She laughed, sudden and bright. “Oh my god, this explains <em> so much </em> about Rich’s exes. Shit, I gotta text Alfie. I can’t believe I am meeting Rich’s childhood crush right now, this is amazing.”</p><p>“Fucking excuse me?” he asked.</p><p>“Babe,” she said, with a fondness like she’d known him for years instead of seconds. She dropped a hand on his shoulder, and Eddie blinked, startled, as she continued, “I have known Rich for almost ten years now. I have seen the people he has been attracted to, and, like, sure, he’s repressed as shit but I used to snort so much coke it’s a miracle I have my original nose so who am I to judge? I’m sorry if this is a surprise to you, and I mean, sure, I’ve known you, oh, five minutes, but I feel one hundred percent confident that you were Rich’s first love and he has been chasing that mean high for years. No offense meant, of course, I’m obsessed with it and you.”</p><p>“Oh,” he said. </p><p>“I’m Loretta,” she said. “I’m a comedian, like Rich. Sorry about yelling at you just now. It’s been a bad couple of weeks, you know?”</p><p>“Yeah. I know.”</p><p>“Come on,” she said. She hooked her arm around his and pulled him back towards where she’d been sitting. He went willingly. Eddie got the impression Loretta was the kind of person who always got what she wanted, through sheer force of personality alone. She reminded him of Richie. No wonder they were friends.</p><p>They settled down on the bench next to each other, Loretta’s long legs kicked out next to his, and they stared back across the yard, into the darkness of the empty house.</p><p>“I’m gonna be real,” she said. “I didn’t know Rich had friends besides me and my husband.”</p><p>“We only recently reconnected,” he told her. “At the — at the reunion. We’d all lost touch after Rich moved away in high school.”</p><p>She nodded, the cropped line of her artfully messy hair moving in time with the motion. “That makes sense. I imagine if you guys had been in contact before, he would never have shut up about you.”</p><p>“Thanks?”</p><p>“You’re welcome,” she said, completely sincere. “How’d you get in?”</p><p>“Key under the rock,” he said, which was almost not a lie: Richie, the useless fuck, kept a hide-a-key rock on the porch.</p><p>“What a dumb bitch.” Loretta smiled, fondly if somewhat shakily, as she unknowingly echoed Eddie’s sentiments.</p><p>“I just moved to LA,” he told her. “Richie had mentioned, you know, that he, uh, lived near Bill — William Denborough, our friend — when he told us where his house was, and I’m staying with Bill, while I look for a place. And I was out on a walk and then here I was.”</p><p>She nodded again. “That’s wild they were so close. They had no idea?”</p><p>“No,” said Eddie. “Bill was — is — pretty torn up about it, you know, with everything that’s happening.”</p><p>“Of course,” she said.</p><p>He asked, “So. Why are you here?”</p><p>”Bit like why you are, I think. You know — just trying to feel closer, I guess. You don’t think about how much time you spend with someone until all of a sudden you can’t anymore. I mean, we’d get busy and sometimes we could only text and fight on Twitter for fun, and email each other jokes we were writing and having trouble with. But he was always there to — and now. Well.” She pushed her glasses up into her hair suddenly and pressed the heels of her hands hard into her eyes, taking a shuddering breath. She said, voice thick and wet, “God, where the <em> fuck </em> is he? Where the <em> fucking </em> — I just want — fuck. Sorry, sorry. You probably — sorry.”</p><p>“I know,” he said.</p><p>She sniffed.</p><p>“I didn’t think Richie wrote his own stuff,” Eddie said, tentatively, after a moment.</p><p>Loretta dropped her hands and looked at him sideways, mouth quirked. Her eyes were red, mascara blurred around the edges and flaking. She was still impossibly gorgeous. She said, “He told you? Huh. Yeah, for the most part. I mean, a few bits of his big acts are still him, and the delivery, of course.”</p><p>“Do you know why?” he asked.</p><p>“No. And, yeah, I never got it, either. His old stuff was so good. His first tour was a fucking critically acclaimed masterpiece or whatever. It was, like, ‘02, and it was so short it didn’t get properly filmed, and the only parts of video of it floating around are stuff from, like, his Letterman debut. I think there’s a fucking cassette of it somewhere maybe. But it was all this hilarious, weird shit on retrograde amnesia and it was just so good. It’s what got him on SNL. Sometimes at small gigs he’ll go off book with stuff. Some of that old weirdness. Sometimes other stuff. He’s been workshopping this bit about him telling my husband, a WWE wrestler, that he thinks professional wrestling is fake and it fucking kills me but I doubt his a-hole manager willl ever let him use it because it’d basically be him coming out on stage and it’d <em> totally </em> torpedo the Brand.”</p><p>“I didn’t know that,” he said.</p><p>“Oh, it’s so good,” she said.</p><p>“Did you see it live? His first stuff.”</p><p>Loretta shrugged. “Maybe? I was pretty young then, not super into stand up, and that was kind of the last hurrah of my cokehead years, but it seems like the kind of thing someone would have gotten me a ticket to — place to be seen, I guess. But after I got clean, and I started getting into comedy, I listened to the recording of it, saw a clip or two.”</p><p>Eddie blinked. “Oh.”</p><p>She glanced over at him and laughed. “Oh, man, sorry — you really have no idea who I am, do you? Wow. Sorry. Hello, I am Loretta Hoechlin, runway model turned stand-up and coke addict, ten years sober. I hit the coke thing pretty regularly in my acts so it’s a little wild for me to have someone get taken aback by it.”</p><p>“No, no,” he started. “I’m sorry—“</p><p>“That’s actually kind of how Rich and I met,” she told him, waving his apology away with her hand. “Well, first he came to one of my shows when I was just starting out years ago and tried to awkwardly pick me up.”</p><p>“How?” asked Eddie, morbidly curious.</p><p>Loretta affected an impressively credible version of Richie’s voice and said, “Nice job up there. What are you, twenty-two? You really have a husband or do you wanna go bang one out?”</p><p>“Wow,” he said.</p><p>“Yep,” she said. “It was pre-sobriety for him, so I like to cut him a little slack. Also, I bet he’d polish it up more for you.”</p><p>Eddie thought back to all the times Richie intimated that he was fucking Eddie’s mom, and was pretty sure Loretta was wrong but didn’t have the heart to tell her.</p><p>“Anyway,” she said. “We ended up running into each other at an AA/NA meeting like a year later, he apologized for being a creep and invited me to breakfast, I watched him eat like twenty dollars worth of hash browns, and decided he was my new best friend. Also, it’s a pretty small circle of people, sober stand-ups. It’s, like, us and Mulaney. So we gotta stick together, eh?”</p><p>“Yeah,” he said. He thought about that night in the Jade of the Orient, Richie’s mouth around the shot glass. <em> What that town, </em> he thought, <em> has done to us. </em></p><p>“We still go to meetings together, sometimes, him and me,” she said. “I’ve been sober for a while now, like I said. But it’s nice to go. Sit in some church basement, drink shitty coffee, try to articulate the reasons why we became what we are.”</p><p>Loretta scuffed the toe of her truly appalling sneakers through the grass. They probably cost half a grand.</p><p>“He grew up bad, right?” she asked after a moment. “I mean. Where you guys grew up, it was bad.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Eddie said. “There were — some kids died, when we were little. Our friend’s little brother. Murdered, I mean. It was, well, a lot.”</p><p>She snorted. “I imagine. He never talked about it, obviously. The amnesia. I’ve been reading about it, the town, Derry. It makes sense, you know, why he would have pressed it all down. Everyone thought it was a bit, the amnesia thing, but it wasn’t, was it? He really. Jesus. And even blacking it out, even making it go away, he still couldn’t get far enough.”</p><p>“Yeah,” he said. Listening to Loretta talk about Richie was like listening to someone talk about a subject he was an expert in, but they did it in a different language, one that was close enough to his that it sounded almost right.</p><p>He thought, not for the first time, that it wasn’t fair, how little of each other they truly got — and how little it mattered in the end.</p><p>“I spend a lot of time talking about Richie in therapy these days,” Loretta was confessing to him. “It probably shows. Here, in this world, in the fucking biz, I think I probably know him better than anyone. But I always knew I didn’t have all of him. I don’t think that’s something he knows how to give. I don’t even think he knows that he’s not, most of the time. I mean, there was obviously the,” she waved a hand, “you know, closet, and everything that shit does to you. But the whole amnesia thing. He really — a bad thing happened to me too, Eddie, when I was a kid, is the thing. And more bad things happened to me after, and often I was the bad thing, the worst thing but — the bad things that happened to Rich, the things the world made him — shit, I don’t know. Does this make any sense? Just — it was harder for Rich, I think. The sadness was too ingrained. It got to him earlier, or maybe it was the same time, but it held on for longer. And so to confront that part of himself. To try to make sense of it. You know, I don’t know if he ever knew well enough the sadness inside him to be able to talk about it.”</p><p>But Eddie knew: Derry, the clown, all of it.</p><p>“Maybe someday he’ll be able to tell me everything,” she said, almost to herself. “I’d like that a lot. He’s such a good person. He’s such a good friend.”</p><p>“He is,” said Eddie, the tense stuck in his throat.</p><p>“Gimme your phone,” she said suddenly, making the universal <em> give it here </em> gesture with her outstretched hands. “C’mon, babe, fork it over.”</p><p>Eddie handed it to her, unlocked, and she immediately started typing into it.</p><p>“So I’m Loretta, obviously, Hoechlin — buckle up for that spelling, it’s weird and Dutch I think — and Rich calls me Heck, so I’ll put that in there too. You can if you want. I have, like, so much free time right now because I just finished my last tour and the show I was writing for just ended — so, text me sometime, eh?” she said. “We’ll grab coffee. You can tell me about baby Rich, and I’ll give you all my best big Rich stories, and when they find him —”</p><p>Eddie couldn’t look at her. Was it worse, he wondered — the knowing or the not? He sat alone in his grief, the cold hardness of its surety like bedrock: Richie was gone, Richie was gone, Richie was gone.</p><p>But hope, he thought, hope was thinking that he was just around the corner and every single day thinking, <em> This is the day he comes home, </em>and it never was. Would you start to want the grief of knowing? It would be faster, at least. Like ripping off a band-aid.</p><p>“We’ll all hang out,” she finished.</p><p>“Sure,” he said. </p><p><em> Coward, </em> he thought.</p><p>“I was going to go to a meeting later,” Loretta told him. “They make me feel closer to him, too, you know, even though it’s probably fucked up. But we really do like that shitty basement coffee. You can come with me, if you want?”</p><p>Eddie felt caught between his guilt and her sincerity, like whiplash, and he almost blurted everything out right then to her. It wasn’t fair to her, or to him. They could have this sadness together. They each had these different parts of him, and together they could make a whole ghost.</p><p>“I’d love to,” he said instead. “But I have a conference call at four. Another time?”</p><p>She smiled. There was a little gap between her two front teeth that he hadn’t noticed before. It made her seem very young, he thought. She said, “I’ll hold you to it.”</p><p>They stood up together and Eddie suddenly found himself in Loretta’s arms. She bent herself so she could hook her chin over his shoulder and she squeezed him once.</p><p>“Thank you. I’m glad I met you, Eddie,” she said before she pulled back. She looked him square in the eye. “Seriously, text me, okay?”</p><p>“I will,” he said, and meant it.</p><p>He watched as Loretta let herself out of the yard, watched as she walked up the narrow earthen staircase to the street, and listened as a car unlocked and started. She drove away and he went back into the house, returning to the living room where the book waited on the sofa.</p><p>He looked at the picture of Loretta and Richie screaming at each other on the sofa. He looked back at the book.</p><p>Eddie sat next to it and flipped it open.</p><p><em> Liturgies for the Lost Things, </em> the top of the page read.</p><p><em> Many things become lost, </em> it read below. <em> Many precious things can be lost to us all: from time, from distance, from war: objects, a feeling, hope, loved ones; but these things need not be lost forever. They can come back. </em></p><p>On his other side, his phone lit up with a new message.</p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p>LORETTA “HECKLES” HOECHLIN (RICH’S FRIEND!!) <em> 2.45pm<br/></em>okay so i couldn’t find an old clip of rich </p>
  <p>LORETTA “HECKLES” HOECHLIN (RICH’S FRIEND!!) <em> 2.45pm<br/></em>but here’s the joke about my husband he’s been working on</p>
</blockquote><p>It was accompanied by a video. The freeze-framed image was of a blurry Richie, looking like he was mid-stride, gesturing with a large bottle of Fiji water. He appeared to be in the center of a small wrestling ring — there were ropes behind him, and what looked like a post in the corner — in someone’s backyard. The tree branches above him had lights strung in them, lit and just barely visible in a late afternoon light.</p><p>Eddie pressed play.</p><p>“Okay,” Richie was saying, “so I do a bit on us knowing each other and then I start in, with something like: listen, if you had to pick a guy to have your gay awakening over, I cannot recommend Loretta’s husband more. He’s, you know, super good-looking, got one of those crooked boyish grins. Douchy undercut and a man-bun but he works it. He’s genuinely kind, sweet — though you don’t think of words like that when you see him. “Farmer’s market himbo” maybe. Words like “brick” and “shithouse,” “golden fucking god”. He’s <em> built </em>. He could bench-press three of me. Six foot six, not an ounce of fat. Thighs like little redwoods. And his shoulders.” Richie held his arms out wide. “Listen, I’ve never called a man “daddy” before but —”</p><p>The picture shook as someone — Loretta, he thought — laughed as she filmed. Richie grinned at her and then sobered back into his performance. He said, “Alfie. Jesus. I mean, praise Him and His works, of course. I just think sometimes, how does this guy make me <em> this fucking gay? </em> Like, I’m a card carrying member but he’s not even my type! I like ‘em small, loud, and mean. But then I, like, PTSD flashback to Alfie’s wrestling finishing move — I sincerely encourage you to look this up, like if you did it right now, I would not blame you, go ahead, I’ll give you all a minute to Google it.”</p><p>Richie paused and looked at the camera, saying, “I wanna do a bit here where I wait for the audience to Google it and then they don’t, so then I’ll say, like, I wasn’t joking about you all needing to see what he does but okay, you’re being polite, so I’ll describe it. Alfie, he of the traps and the biceps, basically a hipster version of the Rock, in his little ring undies, chest hair for days lifting another grown man by the legs and spinning his ass around and around and around while the audience counts. I have seen him do this for a full minute. I have <em> been the dude </em> . So this isn’t just the latent homoeroticism, okay, of the world of professional wrestling, of the last true form of American folk dance. This is knowing what the goddamn king of the jungle is capable of, and respecting it. I respect it <em> so hard. </em> He did it to me! I was asking for it, <em> obviously </em> — I’ve clearly been repressed for, you know, all of my life, and like even if I hadn’t been, negative attention is still attention so — so I’ve dealt with my attraction to people by being, um, how do you say, an asshole. Of goddamn course I took one look at Alfie and immediately thought, well, how are we going to get this big ole robot to pick me up and toss me like I’m a bag of potato chips? I figured the quickest route was to tell him — and again, I cannot overstate how much of an asshole I am — was to tell him I thought professional wrestling was fake.”</p><p>Loretta, doing a wonderful job as an audience of one, said, “Oh, Richie, no,” very loudly and clearly and Richie grinned again at her before quickly smothering it.</p><p>“Oh, Richie, yes,” he said. “To recap: Alfie, objectively, a very, very nice Canadian man who can personally  launch John Cena into orbit. Alfie is, I mean, how do I <em> fully </em> realize this man for you if you haven’t already gotten a — okay, uh, he is Beast, in <em> Beauty and the Beast </em> , okay, because we all know Beast is way sexier than the little bitch prince he used to be: he is a big, beautiful man with a gentle heart but also he’s fucking feral. So the words “professional wrestling is fake” left my dumb mouth and Alfie just smiled at me, straight, perfect white teeth only two of which are fake. Then he grabbed me by the ankles and yeeted me across the backyard. Full spin and slam, like, have a flying lesson for your hubris, bitch.” He affected a flat, exaggerated Canadian accent, at least an octave below his own speaking voice. “ <em> Wrestling’s fake, eh? </em>Sure isn’t. I’ll tell you that for free. It hurts. Anyway, that’s the story of, to date, my weirdest boner.”</p><p>The image shook again as Loretta cackled and the last thing Eddie saw before it was over was Richie’s bright, sincere grin as he said, “I’m gonna plant someone in the audience for that ‘oh Richie no’ bit, that was great.”</p><p>He put his phone, face down, on the couch cushion. He kept his hand pressed against it; the other pressed into the book. His phone was warm. The book was cold.</p><p><em> These lost things, </em> the book said, <em> be they what they are, with a proper urging, with careful practise and form, can return. </em></p><p>Eddie picked his phone back up and found Bill’s number. It rang exactly once before Bill picked up, his breathing shallow and his voice thick and wet as he said, “Oh, g-g-god, Eddie, I’m so fucking sorry, Eddie, are you okay?”</p><p>“I’m okay,” he said, turning the phone to speaker and opening Safari. He typed, <em> LAX to ATL, </em> and said, “It’s okay. I’m sorry.”</p><p>“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Bill said, fierce. “I was a fucking <em> asshole, </em> Ed. I shouldn’t have — I know what Richie m-means to you.”</p><p>“Yes,” said Eddie. “But it’s okay.”</p><p>There was a non-stop from Delta that left at ten pm that would have him in Atlanta by six am if it was on time. There was a window seat left. He clicked on it.</p><p>“It’s n-not okay,” Bill was saying. “God, Eddie, I’m so sorry.”</p><p>“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I overreacted. I know you were only doing what you thought best. You were trying to keep me safe when — when Richie was already — you were just trying to keep me safe. It’s okay.”</p><p>He typed in his credit card information and hit confirm.</p><p>“Eddie,” said Bill. “It doesn’t m-matter. I still shouldn’t have —”</p><p>“You’re just trying to keep us all safe,” Eddie repeated. “It’s okay. Listen, I have to go. I have a conference call.”</p><p>“Okay.” He sounded reluctant, and skeptical. “Are you — are you coming back tonight?”</p><p>“No,” he said. “I got a hotel for the night. I just — I still need some time.”</p><p>“Okay,” Bill said again.”That’s fine. Hey — I love you, Eddie.”</p><p>“I love you too, Bill,” he said and hung up.</p><p>He needed to go pack.</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>Eddie fell asleep on the plane, face tipped against the glass, and he dreamed again of Stan.</p><p>They were back on the boardwalk, leaning against the railings at the end, looking out into the sea. The wind had picked up, pulling at their hair and their clothes like someone’s hands.</p><p>From somewhere nearby, he could hear Richie yelling at the seagull, laughing. It sounded far away, like perhaps it was only the wind carrying his voice to them, but it was so close at the same time, right there and real, so, so impossibly real.</p><p>In the dream, Stan looked over at Eddie, sensing, as always, Eddie’s stare, his eyes on him. His smile was gentle, fond and kind and familiar: the same secret one he’d had as a boy, transposed onto the grown stranger’s familiar face.</p><p>“Was it worth it?” he asked at length.</p><p>“What?” asked Eddie. “Was what?”</p><p>Stan looked down.</p><p>Eddie woke up to the wheels of the plane hitting the tarmac in Atlanta. He couldn’t remember what Stan had been looking at.</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>Eddie didn’t know where Stan had lived before, where Patty was now, hadn’t been able to find an address — Stan’s letter didn’t have a return label — but the minute he sat down behind the wheel of his rental car, he had known where he was going, sure as he always had been when he was a boy.</p><p>It was almost nine am by the time he walked up to their little Cape Cod with his blue painted door. It had been just twenty-four hours since Audra had said to Bill, “I just think it’s a little ghoulish,” and Eddie had cracked into two, and kept cracking.</p><p><em> Enough, </em> he thought. It was going to be over soon.</p><p>He felt electric.</p><p>He knocked on the front door.</p><p>A slight, pretty woman with a riot of dark, curly hair opened the door. For a moment, Eddie, staring at her hair, at the curve of her mouth, the collar of her crisp linen shirt, couldn’t speak. In the satchel at his side, the one Eddie had swiped from Richie’s office, the book’s weight felt impossible.</p><p>“Can I help you?” Patty Uris asked.</p><p>“Hi,” he said. “I’m Eddie. I’m an old friend of Stan’s.”</p><p>Patty’s eyes filled with tears until she blinked them away. Then, she set her jaw and said, “Kaspbrak, right? Come on in.”</p><p>She led him quickly though the house, giving him no chance to look around at his surroundings, and into the kitchen. He spent a lot of time these days, he reflected, in other people’s kitchens.</p><p>She gestured for him to sit and then put a cup of coffee in front of him.</p><p>“You got his letter, then,” Patty said.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Could you,” she started, then stopped. She looked into her own cup of coffee. Her hands were gripped around it, fingers overlapping; her knuckles were white with the stress of holding it. A muscle in her jaw jumped and she began anew: “I don’t know who you are.”</p><p>“We went to school together,” he said. “In Maine. When we were kids.”</p><p>“He never talked about it.” She sipped her coffee in three separate motions: lift, blow, drink. Her knuckles were still white. “I would ask him, but he never talked about it. He said it wasn’t important. And for a long time, Mr Kaspbrak, I believed him. Until that man, Mike, called, and I walked into the bathroom and my husband —”</p><p>Patty’s voice was just like her white knuckles, just like how she drank her coffee: controlled, methodical, careful. Tight.</p><p>She was angry, he thought, but not at him: at Stan, at what had happened, at what he had done. She didn’t understand. She was wondering if Eddie did.</p><p>“What did that town do to him?” Patty asked. Her pretty eyes were bright and her cheeks had two high points of color on them, her freckles fading into it. “What did that town do to you all?”</p><p>Eddie asked, “Did you read our letters?”</p><p>She shook her head. “No. He’d already sealed them.”</p><p>“Do you know anything about Derry? There have been some recent news stories.”</p><p>“There were murders,” she said. “When you and Stan were boys. And then again recently. Children, and that man, that poor young man, with his boyfriend — and Rich Tozier, the comedian. He’s missing.”</p><p>“He’s dead,” said Eddie, eyes burning.</p><p>Patty flinched like she’d been slapped. “But I sent him a letter too.”</p><p>“Yeah,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. I have to tell you a story, Patty. I’ve never told anyone else. None of us have. The only person who knows, besides the seven of us who lived it, is Bill Denborough’s wife, and she almost had him committed after he told her.”</p><p>Patty stared at him and then took her own deep breath. “Stan used to have these nightmares. Really bad ones. He didn’t remember them but sometimes — a lot of the times — he would wake me up. Yelling, screaming, shaking. Begging someone. The things he’d say, that he never remembered — I’ll believe you, Mr. Kaspbrak.  But I need you to tell me.”</p><p>So he did. He told her everything: all the things he’d forgotten and that had returned to him, that were still returning to him day after day. He told her about Georgie Denborough and the drain, about the summer they spent looking for him, climbing around the woods and the sewers, searching, hoping. He told her about how they met Ben and Bev and Mike that summer, and how hope would soon feel very far away and unattainable to them. He told her about the things that they saw, one after another, when they were alone. He told her about the house on Neibolt street and he told her about what lived below. He told her about his broken arm, how they fractured and split apart, how they were terrorized and frightened and scared. He told her about coming back together that summer and going beneath. He told her they thought they defeated it but that they couldn’t be sure.</p><p>“We made a pact,” he said. “A blood oath. We were kids. We cut our palms open and held hands and swore we would come back if It returned. If It came back for the town, for other kids, for us.”</p><p>But then, one by one, they’d drifted away from Derry. Bev first, a year later, and at first she responded to their letters but then they too drifted away. Ben was next, when they were fourteen, and then Richie at sixteen. Bill, Stan, and Eddie left at eighteen, still desperately grasping at each other, and then it was all gone, Mike left alone as watchman, putting that weight on his own shoulders when he realized it wasn’t just time and desire that led them to not writing back. It was forgetting. It was losing their memories.</p><p>Mike had waited until he couldn’t anymore to call them back, and Eddie told Patty how he had crashed his car when Mike called, how Richie had run out of a show after forgetting everything he was supposed to say. He told her how they descended on the restaurant, on the Jade of the Orient, and how everything was great until it wasn’t anymore. He told her about the fortune cookies, their grief about Stan. He told her about the tokens, about the failed ritual, about the claw through Richie’s chest and the blood on his hands. He told her how they ran from the ruins and the new pact they’d made, the secrets they swore to keep, and how he didn’t know if he could keep doing it, how it was eating him alive.</p><p>How he loved him.</p><p>How he still loved him.</p><p>How he couldn’t give him up.</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>Patty had pulled out a bottle of bourbon for them when Eddie’s started telling her about the Jade of the Orient, and she’d relocated them to the living room. She’d put two tumblers on the coffee table in front of them, three fingers in each glass, and curled her bare feet under herself as she listened to Eddie speak.</p><p>By the time he was done talking, it was well into the evening and they were well into the bottle.</p><p>Eddie ran his palm across his face when he finally finished, pinching the bridge of his nose. He was buzzed and pleasantly numb, waiting for Patty’s judgement. With Stan’s nightmares and the news coming out of Maine, and even with her promise, he figured he still only had fairly even odds of her believing him, or at least not chasing him from the house with a broom. He hoped she believed him; he needed her help. He thought he could do what the book asked on his own, for them both, but he was positive he’d have a better chance if she was with him. He needed her to come with him.</p><p>Because the fight with Bill had sprung something lose within him, and Eddie only now knew: for four months he had been circling ever closer to a precipice, unaware that he would soon need to decide to pull back or tip over; that now he was over the edge, fingers scrabbling against the sheer cliffside of his insurmountable grief. He needed, finally, to drop.</p><p>After a moment, Patty said, “Well, okay.”</p><p>She was staring out the picture window of the living room, into the darkness of the night. Her glass was empty and she made no move to refill it. Eddie still had about a finger left in his.</p><p>“Well, okay,” she said again. “Did you come here just to tell me this story?”</p><p>“No,” he said.</p><p>“Okay,” she said for a third time. “Do you have a plan?”</p><p>He put the book on the table, open to <em> Liturgies for the Lost Things. </em> He told her, “I figured we’d fuck around with some magic.”</p><p>She looked at him. She bit her lip. Then she reached out, grabbed hold of Eddie’s tumbler with its finger of bourbon at the bottom of the glass, and knocked it back in one.</p><p>“Fuck it,” said Patty. “Why not? I’m in.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. two people exactly like you and me made totally different choices</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Let me ask you a question:</span>
</p><p>
  <span>What would you give up for love?</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>When they touched down in Maine, Eddie headed straight for the Hertz desk to get them a rental. They’d spent the overnight flight from Atlanta to Bangor in relative quiet, a few words exchanged before they both tipped into sleep. Eddie dreamt of Stan, Richie’s laughter as the backing vocals of the track.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Patty had taken the book from him in Atlanta and read the whole of </span>
  <em>
    <span>Liturgies</span>
  </em>
  <span> twice. Then, she’d taken the book into the kitchen, sat down at the table with a yellow legal pad, and gone through it again, making notes. Patty, Eddie learned then, was the manager in charge of scouting operations for the Braves and her passion in work and life was getting shit done. He wanted, so badly, to see her and Stan next to each other, sharing space and talking in their dry, matter of fact voices. He wanted to know if her sense of humor was like Stan’s had been, strange and odd and a little morbid; he vowed to find out, even if things didn’t work out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wrote in a neat, straightforward copperplate, outlining what they would need to pick up when they got to Derry and the steps they would need to take, a few questions for things that she wasn’t sure what they would need — the liturgy was supposed to be recited to someone, but who? And it didn’t give quite as exact instructions for the asking, either, a short recitation, a call and response for the group to intone at the end, but the rest was murkier — would they need to make it up as they went along? She had put a few suggestions beneath those notes, bullet pointed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>On a single sheet of yellow paper, she broke </span>
  <em>
    <span>Liturgies</span>
  </em>
  <span> down to its base parts, tidied them together and created the beginnings of a roadmap. Eddie, always gifted with directions, knew he’d be able to get them the rest of the way there.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>The drive from Bangor to Derry was about two hours long, according to the Google map that Patty had pulled up on her phone. Eddie shaved half an hour off the time, steering wheel gripped tight and foot leaden.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They went straight to the library, to Mike’s old place above it. It was unlocked and unoccupied, and no one had turned the power off yet. He was unsurprised.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie dropped his bag by the worn looking couch and pointed Patty to the bedroom, though he figured neither of them would be getting much sleep while they were there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Something was in the air, there, something different from the last time Eddie had been there. Perhaps because the nightmare was finally gone — or perhaps because there was a new nightmare in its place: a fear that they wouldn’t be able to —</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie shook the thought away, and looked up at Patty, waiting in the open doorway of the bedroom, a bag in one hand and the yellow legal paper folded into quarters in her other. There were dark smudges under her eyes, and her cheeks seemed hollow. He wondered if the last time she had slept well, had slept through the night, was when Stan was still beside her, warm, instead of just the cold thought of him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He himself had maybe slept eight hours over the last seventy-two, which felt right in line with being back in Derry, and he had never quite slept through the night even before that, plagued by unknown terror and sharp, unrelenting anxiety, and he wanted nothing more to crawl back beneath the sheets and dream of Stan, and Richie’s present laughter.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But the dark moon was the next day, and they had work to do.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>It was surprisingly easy to gather together what they needed for the ritual. Or, perhaps, it wasn’t — Derry had always been strange, Eddie figured, so it stood to reason that it wouldn’t be that hard to find what you need to cast a spell in a town that had been plagued by the supernatural for over a century. No one even batted an eye as they moved from store to store, crossing things off Patty’s list.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They’d picked up vials of essential oils at a Whole Foods before they’d left Bangor, vials of oakmoss and cedarwood and amber, not wanting to leave those things to chance, but everything else they’d been able to source locally. Tallow candle sticks by the dozen, cedar chips, bunches of aloe and asphodel and ivy, rowan herbs and chamomile, a bell that rang low and sweet — all culled together from little stores that lined the main street, no one looking twice at the purchases.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Even the graveyard dirt part — Eddie hadn’t exactly been super wild about harvesting it fresh, but if that didn’t raise any eyebrows, nothing would.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Paused outside the pharmacy, Eddie feeling the edges of anxiety and old fear press at him, Patty looked at her list.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re almost through,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What else do we need?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Mugwort,” she said. “A lot of it, and thistles. We need charcoal from an unswept chimney  — was there a fireplace back at the library?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie’s phone buzzed in his back pocket. He reached for it, saying, “Yeah, we can scoop some from there,” and glanced at the screen. Bill was calling.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Eddie,” said Bill, relief clear in his voice when he hit answer.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, Bill,” he said. “What’s up?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Eddie,” he said again. “I — I just had to — I’m so sorry, Eddie.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s okay,” Eddie said. “We’ve already had this conversation.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Patty raised her eyebrows. He waved a hand at her. She pointed to her list, the line that read </span>
  <em>
    <span>white chalk,</span>
  </em>
  <span> and jerked her thumb at the pharmacy. He nodded and she ducked inside.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bill was saying, “I still shouldn’t have said those things, Ed. I shouldn’t have — I’m such a fucking asshole, Audra ripped me a new one and a half, and then </span>
  <em>
    <span>Mike</span>
  </em>
  <span> called and made me cry using only his words, and Ben sent me an indecipherable texted that had English words in it, I know it did, but the emojis, but I know it was bad too. I just — you just left, and I didn’t hear from you, and you haven’t come back, and, man, I know I don’t deserve  —  everything I’ve put you guys through, all this time — I couldn’t. I </span>
  <em>
    <span>couldn’t.”</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s okay,” he said again. “Dude, I really need you to calm the fuck down, okay? It’s fine. I’m fine.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“When are you coming back?” Bill asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Depends.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Depends what?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m not sure how long this is going to take,” Eddie said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Patty was back outside now, tucking the chalk into the reusable tote she had hooked to her elbow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What?” asked Bill. “What are you doing?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Look,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t — of course I’m g-going to — I don’t understand.” He cut himself off abruptly. There was a note in his voice, however, that said he just might — it was only that he didn’t want to. Eddie could understand the impulse, had been there once. He wasn’t there anymore. “Eddie. Where are you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Patty held the list out to him again. She pointed to </span>
  <em>
    <span>a knife with a brass handle, </span>
  </em>
  <span>in her flat, perfect script.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Mike had one back at the library, I think,” he said to her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Mike — the library,” repeated Bill, emptily. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Shit,</span>
  </em>
  <span> thought Eddie. “What? Who are you talking to? Eddie. Did you  — d-d-d-d-did you  —”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ve gone back,” Eddie said. “It’s okay. I have a plan. Patty’s with me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Gone back,” he said, and then again, stuck there, like he was in shock. “What d-d-do you mean, you’ve gone b-back.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie thought about it. To him, it was simple: he had to. There was no other way forward.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can’t do this alone,” he said, meaning everything, fucking everything and nothing, this spell, this world, this life  — without, without, </span>
  <em>
    <span>without</span>
  </em>
  <span>  — </span>
</p><p>
  <span>On the phone, Bill was saying his name.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s okay,” he repeated. “I’m okay.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m coming,” said Bill, decisive. “Don’t — d-d-don’t do anything, Eddie, I’ll be there soon, okay? I’ll b-be there soon.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He hung up.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie looked at his home screen, a plan generic background. He would change that. He would </span>
  <em>
    <span>change</span>
  </em>
  <span> that. He turned his phone off. He looked back up at Patty, who was watching him, eyebrows raised.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He shrugged, then said, “Mugwort, next?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” she said. She pulled her own phone out. “It’s considered a weed, mostly. Says we can find it by streams and embankments. Woods?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Woods,” he agreed, and they went.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>A part of Eddie believed the woods should be different: changed, perhaps like he was. But as with the rest of Derry, it was still the same. The pall of nightmare had lifted, of course, but something dreamlike still lingered, unreal and confused and numb. It was not unlike his own dreams, which seemed to be trying to communicate something he couldn’t quite hear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Patty didn’t notice it. She had, however, noticed when Eddie tensed, before, as the car drove over the invisible line of the limits of Derry.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s just a town,” she’d said, even if she didn’t sound quite like she believed the words coming out of her own mouth. “A shitty one, but just a town.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie repeated that to himself, like a mantra, as they went deeper into the woods that afternoon.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They found the mugwort about an hour in, along the muddied edges of one of the small tributaries to the river that ran through town. The small streams dotted and criss-crossed the woods, and Eddie remembered summer days over the years, jumping in those shallows, trying and failing to skip rocks, splashing each other, the four of them, then seven, then less and less.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can see him here,” said Patty, a little wistful, her fingers digging in the dirt, pulling the mugwort out by the roots. “Stan. And you, too, and the rest, as children.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He nodded, looking at his own grubby fingers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d had his first real asthma attack out here, Stan and Richie and Bill at his side. He’d already had the inhaler, of course — </span>
  <em>
    <span>weak lungs,</span>
  </em>
  <span> his mother had said, </span>
  <em>
    <span>your father had such weak lungs and you will too,</span>
  </em>
  <span> not even bothering to wait and see — but it was lucky, he supposed, that he did have it. Even if, he knew, all those asthma attacks were panic attacks, his small body racked with nameless anxiety and dread from day one. He’d always been able to sense It, he thought.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They’d been running through the woods, for reasons Eddie didn't even recall now, laughing and shoving and skipping over tree roots. Eddie had tripped and fallen at one point, skidding out on the earthen floor. His knees had been darkened with blood and mud alike, pine needles stuck to his torn skin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d stopped breathing, and then he’d tried to start breathing again and </span>
  <em>
    <span>couldn’t</span>
  </em>
  <span> and the sheer terror of the moment felt so present to him again —</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But then Stan had been putting his hands on his shoulders, his thin fingers cool through the fabric of his t-shirt, and Richie had been kneeling in front of him, holding out the inhaler that he’d dug out of Eddie’s fanny pack without Eddie even notice it, guiding it into Eddie’s mouth, reminding him to breathe, it was okay, Eds, just breathe into this, breathe into it.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Even then?</span>
  </em>
  <span> he wanted to ask this memory of Richie, this boy from a bygone time, this boy looking up at him with such care and worry and devotion, his tender hands.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Even then,</span>
  </em>
  <span> he heard the ghost of Richie say.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Had it always been that simple?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It had. He had. He did.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He squinted up into the canopy of the trees. Sunlight was diffusing in — faint, almost intangible, but it was there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It was mainly Stan who dragged us into the woods, you know,” he told her. “Bill did his fair share, especially </span>
  <em>
    <span>then</span>
  </em>
  <span> — but mainly, it was Stan. He wanted to show us the birds.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Patty nodded. “He loved — he still loves them. Did you see the feeders? He likes to share it with me. The things he loves.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, sure, for you — mainly he took us when we were kids because he wanted peace and quiet and he knew if he made it a big deal, all sacred, it’d be the only way he could get us to shut the fuck up,” he told her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She started laughing, and didn’t stop until she was crying. Eddie joined her, in both.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>They returned to Mike’s old, empty home. Eddie went looking for the knife he’d seen in the stacks, last time, and Patty rummaged around for a wooden bowl.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They ordered take-out from a local pizza place, ate in relative silence on the kitchen floor, cross-legged on the wood boards.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How did Mike live here for so long?” Eddie mumbled around a slice of pizza. “This place is a fucking tinderbox.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She snorted. “Have you thought about what you’re going to say?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He nodded. He’d paged through </span>
  <em>
    <span>The Book of Ritual Magicks</span>
  </em>
  <span> on the plane, after Patty had fallen asleep. There’d been a chapter on incantations and one on summoning; and in </span>
  <em>
    <span>Liturgies</span>
  </em>
  <span> itself, it indicated a path, he’d realized as he read. The symbol they’d be required to draw onto the floor, the one they’d light candles around and sit at varied points, was originally for Hekate. She had been the goddess of crossroads, the underworld, and necromancy, and Eddie figured she’d be a good guide for them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good,” said Patty, after he’d explained a little of what he’d learned and decided on. “She sounds good.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He nodded again and uncrossed his legs, stretching them out. “We should try to get some sleep, before tomorrow.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He stood and Patty, still seated on the ground, smiled at him and watched him go.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>In the next room, he lay down on the old sofa, fully clothed, and his body sank down into it, the cushions moving to cradle him. </span>
  <em>
    <span>How many times had Mike done the same?</span>
  </em>
  <span> he wondered, collapsing after a long day of keeping secrets and being watchman to horror, waiting, waiting, staring up at his watermarked ceiling — thinking of the friends that had left him behind, who had forgotten him, wondering if it would truly be so bad to join them in the unknowing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>What Mike had given up for them — they would never be able to give those things back to him, never be able to thank him for it. He had been the best of them, just like Stan, just like Richie — the boys they lost to Derry, and could never get back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie couldn’t live with it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Patty padded softly from the kitchen, flicking the light off behind her, and went up the stairs into the bedroom. A spring creaked and she sighed, nearly inaudible.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie stared up at the ceiling. Eventually, he turned over, curled onto his side, and closed his eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He felt like he was operating on stolen time. That just waiting until this dark moon was too long, too fucking long, but he knew that it was the best chance for everything to work — that was what the book said, that was when it said the spell must be cast. But he couldn’t help but wonder if he should have found it earlier, been here sooner.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Was it too late for them?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He couldn’t — he couldn’t —</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He shoved his hands under the pillow, both curled into fists, nails digging into his palms. When this was over, he thought they’d leave a permanent mark. Grooves worn into his skin as a reminder.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Shut the fuck up, </span>
  </em>
  <span>he tried to tell himself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But, as always —</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Richie, </span>
  </em>
  <span>he thought. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Stan, </span>
  </em>
  <span>and then, </span>
  <em>
    <span>Tell me I’m not too late.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>And he dreamt of them both, and the ocean, just over their shoulders, the taste of salt on his tongue.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Was it worth it? </span>
  </em>
  <span>Stan asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>What? What? Fucking what? </span>
  </em>
  <span>he wanted to scream even as he asked, calmly, </span>
  <em>
    <span>Was what?</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>But he woke up instead.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>When Patty woke up at two am and wandered down to the main room, Eddie was already awake, working at crushing mugwort and thistle together with a mortar and pestle in the kitchen.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She stared at him and then went to the sink to get a glass of water. She drank two full glasses and then sat down at the table with him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Want to help me move the furniture in there?” she asked. “I can get started on drawing the strophalos.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sure.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He put down the pestle and stood.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They were pushing one of the drafting tables back against the wall when the door burst open and Bev and Ben rushed in.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ben shouted, “Eddie, no!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie lifted his hands up from the edge of the table.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey,” he said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ben stared at him, blinking. Bev looked at Eddie and then Patty, and back again. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What?” said Bev.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Bill’s been talking out of turn again, hasn’t he,” said Eddie.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They stared at the two of them for a little bit longer, both looking wild around the eyes. Eddie wondered where they had come from — New York, he thought, or maybe Boston? When had Bill sounded the alarm? Right after Eddie had hung up or sometime later? Had they driven through the night, dropped whatever they were in the middle of, to rush north because Bill couldn’t get on a plane fast enough and he was convinced he would return to Derry to find Eddie hanging from the rafters of Mike’s library?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He was worried,” Bev said at length.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s fair,” he said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So what’s up?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie snorted and Bev cracked a little smile. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re fucking around with some magic,” offered Patty.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ben blinked again. “O-okay?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m Patty,” she said then, hopping up to sit on the table. “Patty Blum-Uris.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh,” said Bev. Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, wow. You’re —”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Stan crushed it,” said Ben with a grin. “Good job, Stan.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Thanks,” said Patty. “I like to think I did pretty good too.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Of course.” Ben nodded vigorously. “He’s — he was the best.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He is,” said Eddie. “Is, is right. That’s why we're here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Eddie?” asked Bev.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Patty side-eyed him. “Did you not say anything to them?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“One sec.” He ducked back into the kitchen to grab the book and returned. He handed it to Bev, open to </span>
  <em>
    <span>Liturgies</span>
  </em>
  <span>. “This is why we're here. I’ve been — I’ve been having these dreams, Bev.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She cocked her head. She dragged her fingers against the print and asked, “Like — do you think they're like mine were?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t know,” he said. They’d only talked about her dreams, briefly, those weeks ago, and only in the context of trying to get them to stay, because otherwise they’d all be dead and the darkness would continue to grow in Derry. Instead, two were dead, and Eddie —</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” he told her, told Ben. “That’s what my dreams — I have ones of Richie, all different kinds, things that could have been, and the thing that happened — and Stan’s there too, in the better ones, in the best one — I know this wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It was all of us, together, the first time, and that’s how it should have been — they’ve just been lost, don’t you see? Just — just lost, from the story, and they weren’t supposed to go when they did. That’s what my dreams are telling him. They’re just lost somewhere, and we have to find them.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bev stared at him, eyes wide. She glanced at Ben, whose mouth was twisted in a rictus of a smile. She looked back at Eddie.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He felt like he was back on the edge of the cliff again. He wanted to outstretch his hands to them, and pull them over the edge with him. He could see, in his mind’s eye, those outstretched hands of his shaking.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bev and Ben were still staring at him. Patty was still sitting on the table, her fingers twisted together and white, like they had been when Eddie first asked her to join him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s not that different,” said Ben, softly, “I guess, than from last time, right? And, I mean — killer clown, magic? A leap of faith.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“A leap of faith.” Bev sounded unsure, frightened. She’d seen more, Eddie thought, than any of them. Had been through more, had had more asked of her than any of them. But her eyes flashed then, and her jaw set. She nodded once and repeated, “A leap of faith. Okay. Okay.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Patty smiled brilliantly from the table.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We need to wait for the others, though,” Bev continued. Eddie raised an eyebrow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Bill and Mike,” said Ben. He pulled his phone out of his back pocket and glanced at it. “Bill managed to get a seat on a plane into Logan around midnight, and Mike’s flight from Orlando starts boarding at five am. They’ll need to meet up, get a rental — should be here around noon, I think.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s fine,” said Patty. “We can’t begin the spell until moonfall anyway.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bev handed the book back to Eddie. She asked, “What do we need to do to get ready?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie blew out a breath. This was good, he thought. This was great.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Afterall, long ago — and not so long ago — they had been magic together. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They could be magic together again.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>Bev and Ben, it turned out, had indeed driven through the night, so after only an hour of assisting with grinding herbs and chopping up flowers with the brass handled knife, they’d needed to retire to the bedroom to grab a few hours of sleep. Apparently only Eddie and Patty had managed to train their bodies to operate through sleep deprivation.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They’d used the time the others were asleep to chalk Hekate’s strophalos on the floor of Mike’s old rooms, all the furniture pushed out to the edges of the room or dragged into the hall, out of the way. Patty had a deft, intricate hand for the work — Ben probably would have been the best choice, she said, acknowledging the fact that the other man spent much of his time hunched over drafting tables, but Patty admitted she spent more than a little time on conference calls with lawyers doodling until she needed to add in reasons why she thought a prospect deserved the higher end of the payscale before falling into silence again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie stepped out around seven am to head down to the diner and grab them all coffee and breakfast pastries. The only thing they hadn’t managed to stock Mike’s old place with was edible food, caught up in the minutia of crafting the spell and getting it right, getting what they wanted </span>
  <em>
    <span>back.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Bev roused herself when Eddie returned with the coffee, joining Eddie in the kitchen while Patty walked the apartment and chalked additional symbols across the walls, onto the window ledges, against the door jambs.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He stood in silence with Bev, getting halfway through his cup before she looked up from hers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What for?” he asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She dragged her finger against the scrubbed wood of the counter she sat on. “I think I knew, back then. About — well, about you two. I never asked, I guess because I didn’t know how to ask.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We were just kids,” he said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” she said. “But I loved you guys. And I should have been there for you, more, before and after. I was just so caught up in my own life.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Bev,” he said. “Your dad.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She locked eyes with him. “And your mom.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He looked away first. “We were just kids,” he repeated. “We didn’t know — and, honestly, Bev, I wouldn’t have — Jesus fucking Christ, can you imagine what that would have been like? If you had tried to talk to me about it? I would’ve lost my </span>
  <em>
    <span>fucking tiny brain, </span>
  </em>
  <span>Bev. I had no idea about myself.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She blinked. “You didn’t?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie shook his head. “Not until — not until it was too late.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, honey,” she said. She slipped off the counter to stand next to him, shoulder to shoulder. “Listen. Bill called me, right after you left. Well, Audra called me. Bill was freaking out. So she told me everything that happened, what he said and — and what you said. I’m sorry we didn’t see it, that we put you through that. We just —”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s okay,” he told her, just as he’d told Bill. Outside of it, now, he truly understood what they were trying to do, why they’d pulled him away. They’d already lost two friends, and a little brother; they didn’t want to add Eddie to that list. He got it, even if a part of him still burned, would always burn.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But they had a chance now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s okay,” he repeated. He pressed his shoulder into hers. “I mean, I’m going to continue to make Bill fucking </span>
  <em>
    <span>work</span>
  </em>
  <span> for it, of course.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Of course,” agreed Bev, smiling against the rim of her cup. “He owes us.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He owes us so fucking much,” Eddie said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ben stumbled into the kitchen, bleary-eyes and pillow creases in his cheek.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Is that coffee?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bev handed him the rest of her cup and watched fondly as he drained it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie pretended to gag into his own.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>Ben’s prediction of Bill and Mike’s arrival was an hour off, and they burst into Mike’s apartment arguing about traffic. Bill, Eddie knew, had truly become a Californian parody.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They stopped arguing, Bill mid-sentence on a rant about I-95 and Massholes, when they saw the state of the place. They stared, wide-eyed, at the white strophalos on the dark wood floors, at the faint symbols marking up the bricked, uneven walls, the candles, unlit, over practically every square inch, the smell of fresh cut herbs and earth.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What the fuck,” said Bill at the same time Mike said, “Oh — are we going to do a spell?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>Liturgies for Lost Things,”</span>
  </em>
  <span> Eddie told him and Mike, God bless his fucking weird little heart, just furrowed his brow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I haven’t heard of that. What book is it from?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>The Book of Ritual Magicks,”</span>
  </em>
  <span> said Patty.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Found it in Los Feliz,” Eddie said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you having a breakdown?” asked Bill.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fuck you, man,” said Eddie, without heat. “We fought a fucking interdimensional clown with the power of goddamn friendship and positivity and then bullied the little bitch to death — you can help with a magic fucking spell to resurrect the fucking dead, dude.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bill held up his hands, emotions crossing his face rapidly, one after another. “That’s fair. Just — give me a second, okay? I’m dealing with some serious emotional whiplash right now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll give you sixty seconds,” he said, and then Bill was hugging him, tightly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Eddie,” he said, with something not unlike relief.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry I freaked you out,” Eddie told him. “But also you deserved it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” Bill agreed. “I was an asshat. This has been explained to me at length, from a number of sources.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sorry to interrupt,” said Mike. “But could I take a look at the spell, and the book, maybe?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Here,” said Patty, picking the book up from the sofa where she’d left it after she finished with the sigils.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He cocked his head, staring, like he recognized her but wasn’t sure from where.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s Patty,” said Ben, ducking his head around from the kitchen where he and Bev continued to be on spell ingredient prep. He gestured, uncomfortably wildly, with a knife. “Stan’s Patty!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bill detached from Eddie and went to her side. He asked, “May I hug you? I’m a hugger.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She handed the book to Mike, whose eyes had grown a bit bright and watery, and said to Bill, “Sure, go for it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wrapped her up in his arms, not unlike he had with Eddie that day in LA and just before, and rocked her a little. She patted him on the shoulder, smiling bemusedly at Eddie. Bill was muttering something that sounded like Stan’s name and Patty’s eyes softened. She held him a little tighter herself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Mike sidled up to Eddie. “You told her?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Stan had nightmares,” he said. “He’d talk in his sleep too, apparently. She wasn’t that hard to convince.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And this?” He held up the book.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Again,” said Eddie, “we fought a fucking clown from space or some shit, Mike. And I — I have to try. I can’t — I can’t, okay?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay.” Mike clapped Eddie on the shoulder. He looked deeply knowing, and Eddie had to stare at the floor to get away from it. These people had always known him better than himself, in the end. “We’re here for you, buddy. We’ve got your back.”</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>Moonfall descended upon them quickly. They had everything ready for the spell by around four pm, and had gone out as a group to grab food, shoveling burgers and coffee and fries down at the diner. The waitress recognized Mike, did a double take even, surprised, but otherwise didn’t say anything to them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After, they marched back to the library and the apartment above it. Wordlessly, Eddie went into the kitchen to grab everything they prepared, dropping one thing after another into the wooden bowl, while the others went about lighting every candle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie brought the bowl out and set it at the center of the strophalos. Patty handed him one of the lit candles and he touched the flame to the center of the bowl. It went up immediately, a bright flash of fire that glowed vividly purple for a moment before it burnt itself out right away. The smoking remains of the contents of the bowl glowed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They sat themselves just outside the lines of the white chalk circle, each at one of the curved points of the strophalos. Eddie sat thigh to thigh with Patty on his right, their arms linked at the elbow, and his left hand reached out to Bev. She sat similarly with Ben and they were connected to Mike at the third point. Patty reached out to clasp hands with Bill, sat with Mike, and then they were all linked together. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hekate,” said Eddie, staring into the glowing embers of the bowl at the center, “Dark Mother —  goddess of the underworld, the night sky, and the crossroads — Dark Mother, we call you to us here to illuminate the path. Under the dark moon, we will all channels swing wide open — we will the veils to lift. Hekate, Dark Mother, guide us forward through the veils. Our hands are joined, ready to walk with you, Dark Mother. We are wind, dust —  we are dark, night — we are wish, we are mind. Now, together, we walk —”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He glanced up, eyes meeting Mike’s. He gave him a nod of encouragement and Eddie took a deep breath.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“In the darkness, what things once were lost be found again anew. Shadowed but not gone, come. In darkness, now in candlelight, come,” he recited.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The rest echoed, “In the darkness, what things once were lost be found again anew. Shadowed but not gone, come. In darkness, now in candlelight, come.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The candlelight flickered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Above,” he chanted, “now below.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Above now below,” they echoed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Between now betwixt.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Between now betwixt.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie let go of Patty to ring the bell, one firm, true shake. It was high, and clear. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“At our sides, the lost things,” he chanted, taking Patty’s hand, “return to us. Return, return, return.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The flames flickered again and they waited in silence, palms growing sweaty in each other’s hands. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nothing happened.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Beside him, Patty made a small noise, like a sob caught and broken off quickly. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Shit,” said Bill softly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We can try again,” said Ben.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They were all still holding hands.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are we sure we were supposed to cast during the dark moon?” asked Mike. “Should we have used the full moon instead? This could be considered a releasing spell, after all —”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie thought about the dream, the one with Stan, standing out at the end of the Santa Monica Pier as they listened to the sea and the wind and Richie hurling abuse at the gulls. He thought about how he got more pieces of it as he got closer and closer to Derry, the next small chunk, and the next and the next, then: Stan smiling and asking, “Was it worth it?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was looking down as he asked and Eddie — </span>
  <em>
    <span>was what? </span>
  </em>
  <span>he asked, in the dream — always tried to look down too, to see what Stan saw, but he had always woken up before he could.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But now, sitting in the circle, one hand in Patty’s and the other in Bev’s, looking at the smoldering bowl, the sound of the bell faint and hollow in the air beneath Mike’s voice, he knew with perfect clarity what Stan had been looking at. His wrists, he thought — they’d hurt so badly in the dream. He’d always thought he was leaning too hard into the railing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh,” he said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What?” asked Mike.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He knew what he had to do.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie didn’t know how he knew: he just did. It was that same alien confidence he’d felt at Patty’s when he realized he had already tipped over the precipice. It was that same calm, far away voice he’d had two days ago at Bill’s. The path was illuminated, the way forward no longer unknown — the veil lifted. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Some things required sacrifice.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He let go of Bev and Patty, and leaned back behind himself. The knife he’d used to cut the aloe and asphodel was still there and he clasped his hand around its worn, wooden handle one more time.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ben noticed first, glancing around Bev. “What —?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m not going to leave them behind,” said Eddie evenly and slit his forearm open, from elbow to wrist, to the bone. Then the other, fingers growing numb against the handle, slick now with blood, the beige of his khakis already dark, and Patty started screaming.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ben was on top of Eddie, his big hands closed around the split edges of his arms, desperate.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The room burst into activity around them, Bev diving to join Ben, to try to stop the bleeding — Bill, throwing himself out of the circle, on his hands and feet frantically crawling toward his jacket, his phone — Mike, standing, running from the room, shouting, “There’s a med kit in the office!” — Patty, screaming, sobbing, </span>
  <em>
    <span>what have you done</span>
  </em>
  <span> —</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie was underwater.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie was far away, sitting on the ocean floor. It was bathwater warm, and salty against his lips. He thought about summer, warm skies and green grass and the ocean breeze, somewhere above him. He wasn’t entirely sure how he was breathing; he suspected it didn’t matter, just like how the ache in his arms didn’t matter.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Stan, he thought. The boardwalk, Richie’s laughter —</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Huge sea turtles swam past. Slow, even sweeps of their fins, bearly rippling the water around them. He watched the turtles as they moved, mesmerized. He’d never seen anything that large in his life. They were unreal.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>One turtle circled Eddie, fins practically in his hair. Their touch felt like a sob stifled within his chest by unexpected comfort — like fingers pressed into his cheek, warm and fond. He felt safe, at home, at peace, and it broke his heart. This couldn’t be it. This </span>
  <em>
    <span>couldn’t.</span>
  </em>
  <span> He still needed — where </span>
  <em>
    <span>were they</span>
  </em>
  <span> — but maybe it was okay! Maybe they weren’t here, because they were somewhere else, and that place was better, was better —</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie realized that he heard voices but not voices: his far away voice, he thought.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was the Turtle, the one circling ever close.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>OH EDDIE, the Turtle said. OH MY BOY. WHY ARE YOU HERE? YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE. NOT IN THIS WORLD.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What world?” he asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Turtle looped in front of him. Eddie caught sight of one of its eyes, large and dark and warm and infinite. It looked like it was crying; it looked like it was laughing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>THIS PARTICULAR WORLD, it told him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“This ocean?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>NO, said the Turtle. THE WORLD OUTSIDE THIS WORLD.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t understand,” said Eddie.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>IT DOESN’T MATTER, MY BOY. WHY HAVE YOU COME?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I was trying to get them back,” he said. “It’s not right. It shouldn’t have happened that way.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>YOU COULD SAY THAT OF A GREAT MANY THINGS, it said. THAT IS THE TRAGEDY OF THE WORLD. THAT THINGS SHOULD HAPPEN THE WAY THEY DO. WHAT IS IT YOU WANT?</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Him,</span>
  </em>
  <span> Eddie thought, </span>
  <em>
    <span>him,</span>
  </em>
  <span> again and again, the litany of his mind unchanged after all these years. Same now as then: in LA, in Atlanta, in the woods, underground. Him, him, it had always been him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I want them back,” he said. “Can you give them back to me? To us? Patty —”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I CAN, said the Turtle. BUT YOU KNOW THERE IS A COST TO THESE THINGS.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Some things required sacrifice.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He stared up at the Turtle. It struck him as odd, as funny, that he was still sat on the ground like his, legs crossed, his bleeding arms across his thighs, palms up. Where had the knife gone?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>WILL IT BE ENOUGH? asked the Turtle. Its big, infinite eyes stared at him. THE COST.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fuck that. Give them back. Haven’t we given enough?” Eddie pleaded. His mouth was full of saltwater; it could have been the ocean or it could have been his tears. “I don’t care. Fuck it! Fuck the cost! Give him </span>
  <em>
    <span>back</span>
  </em>
  <span>. I just want him back. I’ve given you enough.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>YOU HAVE. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Turtle’s voice-not-voice was thoughtful. It watched him, its circle around him widening and shrinking intermittently. All the other turtles were swimming closer as well, a wall of shell and green and dark closing in around him, watching.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Around him, the water grew darker. His bleeding wrists, he thought, and something in him stung but he couldn’t name it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Turtled settled its large, heavy weight against Eddie’s side. Eddie turned to look at it and he knew that if it had hands, they would be at Eddie’s face, holding him. Those eyes, huge, endless. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Haven’t I given enough?” he asked again, demanded. “Haven’t I fucking — I didn’t even let him — I couldn’t let him tell me he loved him. I couldn’t let him go. I had to. Don’t you understand? I had to make sure he knew. This is the only way I can tell him. This is the only thing I can do for him. Haven’t I fucking given enough? Haven’t I finally been fucking brave?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>YOU ALWAYS WERE, the Turtle told him. YOU WERE ALWAYS SO BRAVE.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The other sea turtles circled closer, and the darkness. Eddie watched them and wondered at their closeness. What did it mean? They were there, he thought, to carry him — his body, at the end, borne back to the surface, to be found.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was sorry that Richie wouldn’t hear the words from him, now, but he’d know. He’d know what Eddie had given, and why.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>WAS IT WORTH IT? the Turtle asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie thought, </span>
  <em>
    <span>Of course, </span>
  </em>
  <span>but couldn’t make his mouth form the words. But he thought the Turtle knew. He had to have already known. How could he not?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Things were getting too dark at the edges, too fuzzy to grasp. His arms hurt so bad. Somewhere, he could hear Patty still screaming. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It all felt so far away. Insubstantial.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Of course it was worth it,</span>
  </em>
  <span> Eddie thought again. </span>
  <em>
    <span>It was fucking </span>
  </em>
  <span>Rich</span>
  <em>
    <span>, and Stan, of course, of </span>
  </em>
  <span>course </span>
  <em>
    <span>it was wor</span>
  </em>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. and that, somehwere,</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie?<br/></span>
  <span>Eddie.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie —</span>
</p>
<p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>We are at the beginning again:</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You’re back there, in the dark, beneath, and he bleeds out in your arms.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>I am here too. I have always been here, waiting, since I left. Waiting for all of you.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>We are together again, and he is bleeding out in your arms.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>I want to put my hand on your shoulder, put my hand on yours as you press it into his chest. I want to stop your hands from shaking with my own, but I cannot, and so you press and press and press and you keep saying things that you cannot recall, later, what they meant. You say, “It’s okay,” and you say, “I’m here,” and you say, “You’ve got this, you’ve got this,” and you are so scared and so wild, and you are shaking, shaking, shaking.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You cannot stop the bleeding. It is happening too fast, and there is the yelling and the screaming.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Someone puts their hand on your shoulder. It is not me.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What the fuck,” someone is saying, over and over. It could be you. It could be anyone.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What the fuck do we do?” someone asks.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You remember now: the leper, in the pharmacy, your hands around its throat, the feel of your victory, short as it would be. You remember how it shrank as you screamed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s it,” he says. “That’s it, Eds.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There’s more than one way to make something small.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The others light up in realization and run off, scrambling one after the other. I watch them go. A part of me goes too; a part of me stays.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You are still there.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You are still trying.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Your hands ache, your arms.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey,” he says.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>I want to tell you: it’s okay. I am right here with you. I am right here with him. I always will be. But I do not think it will comfort you; this part of the story will always be the worst part, no matter the ending.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You were brave,” he is telling you, “really brave.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You have never thought of yourself as brave. That has always been a word for other people. Bravery, and happiness, have always been things that have belonged to people who are not you — this is what you’ve alway told yourself. You have never let yourself have those things, even when you were a child, even when they were things within your reach. You never let yourself believe them.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But you were. I wish I could tell you how brave you always were. He is telling you now, and you don’t believe him, but it is true. You were always the bravest amongst us. You were brave there, then; you are brave here, now.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You cannot hear it. You don’t let yourself.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You don’t let yourself hear lots of things.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The things he wants to tell you, the things you deserve to know — things about him, about you, about you together, things perhaps you have always known but cannot give voice to, have never allowed space for.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s not your fault. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She never let you either.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She never wanted you to grow. She always wanted you to be a small thing, easily kept, caged in her heart and only her heart, and you never were. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You just didn’t know.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>This is a thing I want to tell you: you are so much more than she let you be, than you let yourself belive you were. I cannot say it enough, but you cannot hear it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You were brave,” he tells you again. “Hey. Hey. I have to tell you something.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s okay,” you tell him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” he says. “Listen.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m listening,” you tell him, but you aren’t. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>I’m sorry. You will regret it forever.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I have you tell you,” he says.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>I try to tell you: it’s not cowardice. This thing, this moment, your running — it has never been cowardice. That’s not the right name for it. You have only ever been trying to protect your heart; we have only ever been trying to protect our own.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>I know this better than anyone else here.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s not cowardice, though you’ll call it that for a long time after this. It isn’t cowardice, but it is fear and it is longing and love. It’s a horror and devotion. It’s running, because you cannot stop and you cannot let go. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s being swallowed up.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Some things require sacrifice.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But it’s okay. It will be okay. I know it does not feel like it now — how could it, in this place? As you stand and walk away from him, how could it be okay? I want to tell you: trust me. I am here. This story is a nightmare, that much will always be true; but, remember, remember — and this, </span>
  <em>
    <span>this</span>
  </em>
  <span> I want to shout at you, yell this until you hear me, even knowing you can’t, I want to, I want to scream this — it is also a story about devotion.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>I am still here, after all. I am with you. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>I’m always with you now.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” you are saying to him. “Save your breath. It’s okay. I’ll be right back. It’s okay.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You press your jacket tight to his chest one more time and let go of him, turning to stand.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The others are yelling now, and you join them. Together, the five of you yell at It, your voices overlapping, over and over, telling It what you think of It, telling It what It truly is. I say my part too, but you do not hear it. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Together, we make It small. Together, we end It.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then —</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You return.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You return, giddy with victory and you touch his cold face, and you wonder why it is cold. This is the moment that hurts the most, the discovery. I want to take you away, you have to know that — I would protect you from this, if I could, shelter you in my arms. I can’t. I’m sorry.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie —</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Why did he go when he did?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You put your hands in his shirt. You pull and pull and pull.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His name, over and over, and I am saying it too, reaching, and you have to go. You have to go.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They don’t let you stay. You beg, but they don’t.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>I want to tell you that I’m sorry. I know you want to stay.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But, Eddie: you have to go back now.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Take my hand. It will be worth it.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. we're still together. that's enough for me.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Eddie’s first thought was: <em> I have the worst fucking dry mouth on the planet. </em></p><p>His second thought was: <em> Huh. </em></p><p>He was floating, he realized, in the shallows of the quarry. He blinked, and thought again, <em> Huh. </em></p><p>The last thing he remembered was sitting in the library, arm in arm with Patty, hand in hand with Bev — but that wasn’t right, Eddie thought, that wasn’t the last thing that happened. He’d — he’d —</p><p>What was the last thing?</p><p>He lifted his arms from the water, held them up and examined them, backlit by the bright, shining sun. There were scars on his forearms, the places where he’d slit them down to the bone in the library now silvery white, as if it had happened long ago. He touched the one on his left arm, running his damp finger from wrist to elbow. </p><p>Eddie remembered doing it, the motion, quick and sure, and he remembered the pain coming after, but only an ache — it hadn’t been bad, not really.</p><p>It had been worth it. It was worth it. He had —</p><p><em> My mouth tastes like salt, </em> he thought, and his head felt muddled, too thick, like someone had tossed a blanket over his thoughts, and then he thought, <em> the sea, the Turtle </em>—</p><p>Big eyes, dark, endless, deep as the oceans, infinite as galaxies — understanding, sympathetic, proud — <em> you were always so brave </em> —</p><p>Some things required sacrifice, but maybe just this once —</p><p>“Okay,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “Okay. Did I do it?”</p><p>There was no response.</p><p>He didn’t know what he expected.</p><p>“Okay,” he said for a third time.</p><p>In the shallows, Eddie got his elbows up under him, and then his feet. He fell back down onto his ass pretty much immediately.</p><p>It took him much longer than he would have liked to finally get his feet underneath him and to keep them steady, strong, but eventually he pulled his waterlogged body from the quarry for the second time in two decades and started down the packed dirt path back into town.</p><p>By the time he got to the library, he had been dried out by the noonday sun and no one spared him a second glance, even if he was barefoot and muddy and the fabric of his khakis had remained a terrible rust color that could have only been from one thing. He kept glancing at the thick scars on his arms; they felt like they belonged to someone else, his arms, the things he’d done.</p><p>“Patty?” he called, heading up the stairs to Mike’s apartment. “Bev? Guys?”</p><p>Inside, the candles had gone out — not blown out, but burnt down, and the wax was cool to the touch, hard. The wooden bowl had long ago stopped smoking, and the chalk outlines they’d been sitting around were smeared and hazy. There was blood everywhere, tracked through the strophalos and throughout, and it was absolutely devoid of anyone, Losers and Patty alike.</p><p>Eddie inhaled sharply. Beneath his bare feet, the blood, his blood, was dark and it had grown tacky but not yet dry. There was too much of it to dry out quickly. He clenched his jaw and kept walking; he needed to find his phone, he needed to call someone, he needed to know —</p><p>He moved through the apartment, movements growing jerky and frantic. Where had he put his fucking phone, where was his <em> fucking phone </em> —</p><p>“Fuck it,” he said after five minutes of searching, and Eddie turned on his heel and sprinted from the apartment, from the library, and down the main drag of town, his muddy, bloody feet slapping against the pavement.</p><p>Where would they have gone? What had happened? Where had <em> Eddie </em> gone? In those moments after he’d taken the knife to his arms, after Ben had lunged across the circle to grab his bleeding wrists, after Patty had screamed and kept screaming — where had he gone?</p><p>Beneath the water, on the ocean floor, as the Turtle swam above him, and spoke words without words, and asked if it would be worth it to bring them back — </p><p>Eddie stopped suddenly at some intersection, bent over, breathing hard, hands braced on his knees, and said, loudly, “Oh, shit. Oh shit, what the fuck. I think I’m a witch.”</p><p>Because it was Derry, no one even looked at him, hunched in the middle of the road, barefoot and bloodied — they just skirted around him and kept on their way.</p><p>“This town is a fucking shitshow,” he said, took a deep breath, and started running again.</p><p>He’d know when he got there, he thought. His feet knew where they’d need to go, and he just needed to let them do the work. It had always been that way.</p><p>And so, of course, five minutes later, Eddie crashed into the brick wall of Mike Hanlon’s chest outside the pharmacy and they both collapsed to the ground.</p><p>“Eddie!” shouted Mike, staring at him owlishly from where he was sat on the ground. He scrambled to his knees and grabbed at Eddie, running his hands all over him — over his arms, pressing down and holding. “Holy shit!”</p><p>“I know!” Eddie shouted back. “I fucking know!”</p><p>He pulled Mike into a hug, clutching him fiercely.</p><p>“What the fuck,” Mike said, quietly but with a sort of cautious optimism, and he pulled back to look at Eddie again, eyes searching his face.</p><p>“Eddie!”</p><p>Bill dropped to the ground next to them and dove at them without hesitation, one fluid motion after the crash, slinging one arm across Eddie’s shoulders and the other across Mike’s. The hand on Eddie’s back gripped his shirt and Eddie looked away from Mike’s wide-eyed gaze to see Bill, his eyes wild and grin splitting his face.</p><p>“You fucking b-b-beauty,” he said, giddily. “There you fucking are! Where the fuck have you b-been? Where the fuck d-did you <em> go?” </em></p><p>“Okay,” said Mike, visibly getting a hold of himself. “Hold on, okay, let's get out of the goddamn street, okay. I know this is Derry, but still.”</p><p>He stood and bodily hauled Eddie and Bill up with him, Bill’s hand still fisted in Eddie’s quarry-water-stiff shirt. Mike dragged them off to the side, back into the alley behind the pharmacy, sitting Eddie up against the wall, and he had an extremely vivid flashback to their childhood.</p><p>He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.</p><p>“Did I do it?” he asked, a little hysterical. “Did I — where are the girls? Ben? Did I —”</p><p>Bill was practically vibrating in place and began to pace the length of the alley. “Eddie, Eddie, you, Eddie, you did that thing and y-you just d-d-d-disappeared!”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“You disappeared,” said Mike. He crouched down in front of Eddie and reached out to touch his forearm. “You cut your arms open and Ben was on top of you, you were bleeding out, and then you were just gone. We had — we had no idea what was happening, and then Patty’s phone started ringing.”</p><p>Eddie’s heart was in his throat. “Who was it?”</p><p>“Stan,” said Bill, voice thick but still grinning. “It was Stan.”</p><p>“He’d woken up in a hospital bed in Atlanta,” Mike said. “He’d been — a nurse said told him he’d been in a coma there for the last few months, after a suicide attempt.”</p><p>There was a buzzing in Eddie’s ears, like static, or ocean waves, crashing. He thought he could hear the gulls.</p><p>He asked, voice breaking, “Rich?” </p><p>Bill’s grin had become so wide it had to hurt. “He’s okay. He’s okay.”</p><p>Eddie scrubbed at his eyes. They were burning.</p><p>“Bev and Patty are with him, in Bangor,” Mike was saying. “It was like with Stan — he’d been in a coma there, listed as a John Doe. They’re not sure what happened to him, they said. He’d been found by the side of the road, with a huge wound in his chest, like he’d been stabbed multiple times. Attempted mugging, they thought but —”</p><p>“So I did it,” said Eddie. Or something had done it, he thought but did not say. Something had brought them back. “I did it. It <em> worked. </em> Right? He’s — they’re okay? They’re okay?</p><p>“They’re okay,” said Bill.</p><p>“You did it,” said Mike.</p><p>“Great,” said Eddie. His heart, in his chest, was going rabbit-fast — he was surprised Mike and Bill couldn’t hear it, or that it hadn’t leapt out of the cage of his ribs on its own yet. He stood. He wasn’t sure how; his legs were shaking.  He didn’t want an Ativan. “Great, what are we waiting for then? Let’s go. Let’s go.”</p><p>Mike stood from his squat. Bill nodded.</p><p>“You got it, buddy,” he said. “But, listen, we gotta get you some shoes first.”</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>Mike and Bill took Eddie back to the library, where they grabbed the bags everyone left behind — in the confusion following Eddie disappearing and the phone call coming in from Stan in Atlanta, they’d all bugged out quickly. Patty had, naturally, fainted when she got the call; Ben, his hands still covered in Eddie’s blood, had taken the phone from her and then <em> Bev’s </em> phone was ringing and it was Richie, confused in a hospital in Bangor, wondering if they’d done it and also where the fuck was everyone, was everyone okay?</p><p>Mike had taken control of the situation then, announcing that Bev and Patty, who was finally coming back around, would go to Bangor to get Richie. Ben would fly to Atlanta, collect Stan, and come back up, and Bill and Mike would stay in Derry and figure out what he had done and where the fuck Eddie had gone. Mike had refused to assume that Eddie had somehow traded himself for both Richie and Stan.</p><p>It would have been worth it, Eddie almost told them. It would have been worth it if he had.</p><p>That was what he had told the Turtle. He wondered what had changed the Turtle’s mind, to instead let them all stay this time. To let them all, someday, grow old together. Like they had been meant to, long ago.</p><p>They got everyone’s bags loaded into Mike’s rental — Bev and Patty had taken Eddie’s, Ben and Bev had driven up in Ben’s own car and so he’d taken that to the airport — and they got Eddie cleaned up, fresh clothes and his sneakers, the quarry grime washed out of his hair and the salt rinsed out of his mouth.</p><p>They left the apartment as it was.</p><p>“Honestly they should probably just burn it down,” said Mike. “Either way, they’ll just assume a bunch of teenagers were fucking around up there when someone finally bothers to go clean it out in a couple of months.”</p><p>Bill laughed and turned up the radio, some old rock’n’roll station, Echo and the Bunnymen singing that he would burn his bridges and smash his mirrors, turning to see if a car would leave.</p><p><em> Richie, </em> Eddie thought, sat in the back of the car, watching Derry fade away for the last time as they drove out of town and towards Bangor. The last time — no one ever had to go back again. They’d done it. Derry — finally, finally — in the rear view mirror.</p><p>He thought, <em> Richie, Richie, Rich </em> —</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>When he woke up and the hospital staff realized they had an Emmy nominated comedian in their midst rather than a John Doe, Richie had been moved into a private corner room at the end of a fifth floor hall.</p><p>As they walked down the hall, Eddie trailing behind Mike and Bill, his hands in fists shoved deep in his jacket pockets, he could just hear the quiet murmur of voices coming from the room. They filed in, one after another, and Eddie saw Bev and Patty at the bedside, all smiles — Patty’s was a little watery — Bev had Richie’s hand in hers — and there was Richie, in the bed, looking tired and thin and too pale, his hair a fucking riot, just like when they were kids, squinting heavily without his glasses, and fuck — <em> fuck </em> —</p><p>Patty, Bev, and Richie all turned towards the door when they walked in and Patty was leaping up from her seat, throwing her arms around Eddie, who buried his face in the curve of her neck.</p><p>“Thank you,” she was saying, her dry, straightforward voice firm, unyielding. “Thank you.”</p><p>“Is that Eddie?” asks Richie. His voice was a little rusty, scratchy, but there was a smile in it, and when Eddie turned his face up to look at him, he had broken into a wide grin. “Eds, I hear you pierced through the veil of death for me and Staniel.”</p><p>Patty stepped back from him, one hand pressed into the small of his back to push him forward, and Eddie, to his immense horror, burst into tears, huge, ugly ones, that shook his whole body and made his throat hurt.</p><p>Silence, except for Eddie’s sobs, descended upon the room and everyone stared.</p><p>“Oh shit,” Richie was saying. “Oh shit, Eds, I’m sorry, I’m sorry —”</p><p>Patty, hand still firm against Eddie, pushed him forward and settled him down in the chair she’d been sitting in. She pushed his head down between his knees, whispering, “Just breathe, give it a second, you’re okay,” and then turned to everyone else.</p><p>“Let’s give them a minute,” she said, firm as her hand had been, and ushered everyone out of the room, closing the door behind them.</p><p>After what felt like hours, Eddie found himself calming down. He sat back up and scrubbed his hand across his face. Richie was staring at him, his eyes landing somewhere fuzzily on Eddie’s cheekbone. He looked shell-shocked.</p><p>“Eds,” he said again, the emotion in his voice layered, fathomless.</p><p>Eddie’s heart broke and mended again in seconds.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Richie was saying again. “They — Bev, and Patty, and you gotta tell me, she’s way outta Stan’s league, right? I can tell — they told me that you — that you’d — what you did for us. And then I had to go and ruin it —”</p><p>“No, no,” he said. “You didn’t. I just. I never thought I’d hear you make a stupid fucking joke again.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>“Yeah, <em> oh </em> .” Eddie took a deep breath. “Rich, I never thought I’d hear your <em> voice </em> again.”</p><p>Richie stared. “Eddie —”</p><p>“No, I gotta,” he said. “That day. That day, down there. What do you — do you remember?”</p><p>Richie made a nervous kind of sound. “I mean, I remember a lot, but it’s kind of fuzzy and was there maybe something in particular you are referencing? That maybe you’d prefer I didn't? Because, again, it’s fuzzy. It can be even fuzzier.”</p><p>“Fuck you, Rich,” he said without heat. “What do you remember? After the Deadlights?”</p><p>“You were standing over me,” he told him. “And then, well, then I saw — or maybe I knew it was going to happen — but I think I saw it coming and I pulled you away but I wasn’t fast enough. And then you were saying how you’d made it small and you guys had to go and — and I wanted to tell you — tell you that I, uh —”</p><p>Richie blushed faintly and shook his head, averting his eyes. Eddie reached for his hand but then stopped before they touched, instead resting his hand next to Richie’s on the bed.</p><p>“It hurt,” Richie said after a moment longer. “I remember being surprised that it hurt but only because I thought it’d hurt more, you know, than it did. I remember thinking that being stabbed in the chest by a fucking six foot crab leg shouldn’t make me think, <em> Huh, I’ve been stabbed in the chest, </em> it should be more like, <em> Holy fucking fuck I’ve been fucking stabbed in the fucking chest! </em> But it was probably the shock talking, right?”</p><p>He nodded. “Probably.”</p><p>“I mean, I’d already been stabbed in the face, so, like, what’s one more stabbing, am I right?”</p><p>Eddie glanced up from his study of their side by side hands — Eddie’s smaller ones, the fine dusting of hair across his knuckles, his thin fingers, and Richie’s larger ones, always seeming too big for his body even now, the pale white scars across the backs from their reckless youth — to look at Richie and narrow his eyes. “Are you trying new material out on me right now?”</p><p>Richie cocked his head to the side. “It depends. Am I successfully distracting you from talking about our feelings and shared childhood trauma?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Then no, no new material here. Just honest communication.”</p><p>“I don’t think you’ve ever honestly communicated in your life,” Eddie told him. “And I met your friend Loretta the other day, so.”</p><p>“Oh, shit,” he said. “Don’t listen to anything from her, she’s a known liar.”</p><p>“Too late,” said Eddie. “She’s sent me videos of you in her backyard.”</p><p>“Shit,” he said again. “Which videos? Is it the one with me and Alf — no, fuck, I shouldn’t incriminate myself. God, I always knew she’d roll on me for a Twinkie. Wait, how did <em> you </em> meet <em> Heck?” </em></p><p>“What, you don’t think I’m cool enough to run in the same circle as an ex-supermodel?” he asked.</p><p>“Man, I’m not cool enough for Loretta,” said Richie. “Our friendship is purely an accident of fate and Narcotics Anonymous.”</p><p>“She mentioned,” he said.</p><p>Richie shrugged. “Anyway, how’d you run into Heck?”</p><p>“I’ve been squatting at your house in LA,” Eddie said, looking back down at their hands, still side by side.</p><p>Richie blinked. Then he blinked again. “I’m sorry, I think I’m going to need you to repeat that.”</p><p>“I've been basically living at your place,” he said. “And Bill’s too, but mainly yours.”</p><p>“Why?” he asked, voice small and unsure but almost hopeful.</p><p>“That day. That day, you told me I was brave, down there,” Eddie said, and then it all came spilling out of him, in one long, endless rush: because if he didn’t get it out now, he didn’t know if he ever would.</p><p>So he told him about how he’d run after the others and then how he returned, only to find Richie cold on the ground. How he’d pulled at Richie’s body and tried to shake him awake. How Ben had had to carry him out of Neibolt because Eddie was refusing to leave, because he was clinging to Richie’s dead body like it was alive. How he felt betrayed by the others for being able to be happy, after, how he was jealous of how they got to become whole again when Eddie was carved out and broken inside, a part of him gone, unreachable now.</p><p>He told him about how he'd never thought of himself as brave, unless it was looking at himself through Richie’s eyes, and how that had given him the strength to figure out who he was, even if it hurt. How he’d looked at his life and decided to leave it all behind: Myra, New York, everything he’d ever known for twenty years. How he had already packed up his life into the suitcases he’d taken to Derry, already prepared and willing to run if someone had given him the word, had given him the courage.</p><p>Eddie told him how he’d gone to LA then, uprooted and transplanted into a different world — not a better one, but maybe someday — how he’d found himself on Richie’s doorstep and how he’d found himself becoming a ghost in Richie’s life, trying to peer in from the outside and make sense of the man he’d left behind.</p><p>“I saw you everywhere,” he told him. “Even when I didn’t want to. Even when it hurt. I saw you everywhere I looked, Rich.”</p><p>Eddie told him about the dreams, some good, some bad. He told him about that fight with Bill and how he’d stormed out of Bill’s house and walked for hours, unknowing of where he was going, until he was at the bookstore and the woman with the infinite eyes and too many teeth smile was handing him <em> The Book of Ritual Magicks. </em> He told him about meeting Loretta in his backyard and how guilty he’d felt, knowing where Richie’s body was when Loretta still hoped he’d come home to them. He told him about the cliff he’d been standing on the whole time. He told him about the plan he made, about what he and Patty had set out to do, to correct, to fix, to set to rights, to recover. He told him how Bill thought he was planning on killing himself, about the others finding out and coming back to Derry one final time, one final time, to help or to stop.</p><p>How Eddie had known, in the apartment above the library, surrounded by candles and burning green things and friends, what he had to do. He told him about what he did, because in the end, it would be worth it. It would either work, or it wouldn’t, and either way: they would be together.</p><p>He may have been brave enough, down there, that day, to throw the post. He may have been brave enough to leave after and keep walking. But he wasn’t brave enough to keep missing Richie. He wasn’t brave enough to give space in his heart to that longing. He wasn’t brave enough to let him go.</p><p>But maybe it wouldn’t matter. Because here, now, was the final secret that Eddie had been keeping, the last thing that he kept locked and quiet within himself.</p><p>“Because I was dead too, I think,” he said. “Most days. Just — it was like my heart had stopped back there with yours, but my body never got the message. And I was just waiting for my body to stop too. Because I couldn’t — I couldn’t —”</p><p>“Eddie,” Richie began.</p><p>“Down there,” said Eddie, “that day — you were trying to tell me something, and I left. I went to help the others, and you never got to tell me. I’m sorry. I know what — I knew what you wanted to say, and I couldn’t hear it, not then, so I. And I tried to stay, after, okay, that’s why Ben had to drag me out, because — because I couldn’t be in a world without you, Rich. That’s it. That’s just fucking — I couldn’t be in a world without you, not anymore, not again. Do you see? It was too hard for me. Do you see? I’m sorry. I was such a fucking coward. But the thing was, I’d lived without you before — I’d done it for the better part of three decades and it was goddamn horrible and I didn’t even know what I was missing then. But to go on? To go on, and fucking<em> know, </em> Rich? I didn’t want to. I couldn’t.”</p><p>“Eds,” he said.</p><p>“I love you,” Eddie told him, voice breaking. “That’s why. That’s why all of it. I couldn’t hear you tell me you loved me too, down there, in the dark, because I fucking loved you and I couldn’t hear it and go on but it turns out I couldn’t go on anyway, so I had to come back. I had to come back to you. Anyway I could. Even if it meant I stayed down there in the dark instead — it would’ve been worth it. It is worth it. It’s <em> you.” </em></p><p>Some things required sacrifice; but maybe, just this once, they had already given enough. There was nothing left to take.</p><p>“Eds,” Richie said again, with a sort of manic intensity. He reached for Eddie’s face and Eddie leaned forward into it, to help Richie’s hands find him, his thumb’s smoothing over Eddie’s cheekbones, the tenderness at odds with his wide, wild eyes. “Eddie. That’s a lot to unpack, man, I’m not gonna lie. But here’s the thing: I don’t care. I mean, I care a lot — about you, mainly — but I don’t care about how we got here. Because we’re here, you and me and <em> Stan </em> and I love you. God, I love you so much, and I finally get to tell you, so let’s dig into all this shit when I’m not tripping balls on pain meds, okay? Let’s just focus on the good stuff. Fuck, Eddie, I love you!”</p><p>Richie was smiling, hard and wide and bright. He let go of his face and grabbed for Eddie’s hand, missed, and tried again three more times before Eddie took pity on his legally blind ass and took his hand.</p><p>“Nice,” said Richie, smile going a bit dopey.</p><p>“Nice?” Eddie parroted. “I spill my guts to you, I show you all of me, I pull back the mother fucking <em> veil </em> for your ass and what I’m getting here is <em> nice?” </em></p><p>“Fuck you too,” he said, smile even wider. “I just told you I love you like twelve times and yeah, <em> bro </em>, it is extremely nice to be holding the hand of the boy I’ve loved since I was basically an infant.”</p><p>“Well, when you put it like that.” Eddie smiled, and if it was a little watery, no one had to know but him.</p><p>“I do,” said Richie. “Now, let's table the big shit for a minute, and allow me to ask: can I interest you in perhaps getting all up on me in this hospital bed?”</p><p>Without breaking their clasped hands, Eddie climbed into the hospital bed alongside Richie. He sat with his back up against the wall and Richie pressed his face into Eddie’s stomach.</p><p>After a moment, Eddie said, “Nice,” and Richie cackled.</p><p>“I love you,” said Richie again, running the fingers of his free hand up and down the silvery scars on Eddie’s wrists, the ones that appeared as he floated in the quarry. Eddie didn’t think he knew what he was doing — or perhaps he did. “I’ve loved you so long. I can’t believe this is happening.”</p><p>“It is,” he told him. “It is.”</p><p>Richie’s thumb stopped on his wrist, at the shallowest part of the scar, where the blade had begun. Eddie’s pulse beat steadily beneath.</p><p>“When?” he asked.</p><p>“Since we were kids,” he said. </p><p>“Me too.”</p><p>“I’ve — I’ve always loved you, I love you.” He pressed his thumb a little closer, and the rest of his fingers held the fine bones of Eddie’s hand. “I can’t believe I ever forgot you. I mean, I don’t — I don’t think I ever did, not what you meant, just who you were. You haunted me. That summer: that’s when I knew. I couldn’t — putting the name on it, it was so terrifying.”</p><p>“I know,” said Eddie.</p><p>“That’s what It used against me,” Richie said. “I can’t believe It used you against me, and I fucking let It.”</p><p>“We were just kids,” he said, like he’d told Bev just, Christ, just a day ago. “I did too, for so long.”</p><p>He lifted his free hand again to Eddie’s face. His palm was so warm. “I’m sorry. I should have — it should have been different.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“I’ve always been so scared of that part of me,” Richie told him. “I’ve hidden it for so long. I couldn’t — I only ever let Heck, and her husband, see that part of me. Did she tell you that? I mean, I never actually <em> told </em> her but I knew she knew. She had eyes, and I was — sometimes, I guess, I was transparent.”</p><p>“I don’t think that’s what she would say,” he said. “I think mostly she’s sad that something happened to you that made you feel like you had to hide it from her — that you couldn’t tell her yourself. That you hurt that way and wouldn’t let her help you.”</p><p>“I will,” he said. “I’m so — Eddie, I am so fucking done with all this shit. We fucking did it, man! There’s nothing that we have to be scared of anymore — well, I mean, there’s probably lots of things to be scared of, and, like, I need so much therapy? I’ve been in therapy and I’ve always wondered why it didn’t work, because everyone was always taking about how fucking great therapy is, and apparently it’s because an interdimensional nightmare clown stole my memories? Like. What the fuck? How am I supposed to tell people about that?”</p><p>“We have a cover story,” said Eddie. “It involves turning the Bowers family into multi-generational serial killers.”</p><p>Richie thought about that. “That’s good. Serial killers are hot right now, I can totally churn out some bits around that and my repressed sexuality once I fully unpack everything.”</p><p>“Really? You’re already planning bits?”</p><p>“You’ve met me,” he said. “Listen, before you confessed your big gay crush on me, you should have thought this through. You know jokes are my coping mechanism. If I gotta come out at forty to publicly hold your hand, you know it’s gonna be in the middle of a set.”</p><p>Eddie snorted. “Yeah, I’ve got some regrets.”</p><p>Richie smiled again, blinding. Eddie realized that the place where he’d been stabbed by Bowers had almost fully healed since that day at the hotel. It looked more like a dimple now, just a crescent of pale skin in his cheek.</p><p>He was saying, “Not big enough to let go of my hand, though, right?”</p><p>“No,” he said. “I don’t think there’ll be anything big enough to make me do that.”</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>A nurse came in a little while later and raised a brow at the two of them squeezed side by side in the little twin sized bed, but she didn’t make him get up or leave. She just went about taking his vitals and making a few notes on his chart, asking him how he was feeling and then immediately regretting it, Eddie thought, when Richie launched into telling her just how great he was now that he’d been reunited with the love of his life.</p><p>“When can you start weaning him off the painkillers?” asked Eddie.</p><p>“Aw, babe,” Richie said, as the nurse snorted in amusement. “It’s cute that you think not being on painkillers will stop me from extolling your virtues to any captive audience.”</p><p>“Oh, god,” he said.</p><p>“Yep!” Richie patted his hand. “Just wait until I start doing it on stage, to people who pay for it.”</p><p>The nurse set his chart back down at the foot of the bed. </p><p>“Well, Misters Tozier,” she said and Eddie opened his mouth only to be jabbed with Richie’s sharp elbow. “I’ll check with the attending, but I think we can probably start deescalating later this afternoon, especially because it seems that you have been making remarkable strides in your recovery since you woke up this morning. We’ll want to keep you in hospital a little longer, of course, and have the physical therapist put together a plan for you too, but honestly, I think you’ll be released sooner rather than later.”</p><p>“Fresh to death,” said Richie. The nurse snorted again and left.</p><p>Almost immediately after, Bev’s head popped around the frame. “Hey, Losers! You guys done emoting?”</p><p>“Never,” said Richie. “We’re gonna be gross forever, we have so much time to make up for.”</p><p>“Well, whatever,” she said. “We’re coming in anyway, so at least keep it in your pants.”</p><p>Bev, Patty, Mike, and Bill filed into the room. Their energy since they’d left had, somehow, become almost even more giddy and manic — or, at least, Bev, Mike, and Bill’s had. Patty, Eddie figured, was still waiting to see Stan with her own eyes before she gave into the emotions Eddie knew were just bubbling under her skin.</p><p>“So, my dudes,” said Richie, addressing his voice in the general direction of Mike and Bill, who had dragged chairs in from the waiting room and were now posting up at the foot of the bed. “I’ve heard all about what Bev, Eddie, and the beautiful Mrs Uris has been up to, but tell me about what you’ve been up to.”</p><p>Mike and Bill launched into their respective stories, Mike promising to put together a slideshow of his adventures in Florida — “Oh man,” said Richie, “Florida, really? I know you were obsessed as a kid but that shit is all racism and hurricanes down there now.” “See, that’s the kind of advice I could have used!” — and Bill making a number of biting remarks about their industry that Richie laughed along with, talking shit about their respective agents.</p><p>As visiting hours began to wind down, a nurse looking in to tell them they had about an hour left, Bev excused herself to take a phone call. Moments later, she was back, grinning a mile wide, and then Ben and Stan, Stan in a wheelchair, appeared in the doorway. Ben was as big and broad and handsome as ever, a little tired looking, but smiling too. Stan had his head resting in one hand, staring in a sort of wonder at them. He looked tired and thin but good. Alive.</p><p>“Hey, Losers!” shouted Ben.</p><p>The room descended into abject chaos. Mike and Bill practically threw themselves at Stan, hooting and hollering like little kids, Bev laughing in the corner. Patty had a hand over her mouth, tears in her eyes.</p><p>“Stan,” she breathed.</p><p>“Hey, baby love,” he called over Mike and Bill’s shoulders.</p><p>Patty pushed her way in between them to hug Stan.</p><p>“Oh, man,” said Richie, quiet. “When we're all emotionally stable, I am so gonna give him shit for that.”</p><p>“Of course,” said Eddie.</p><p>Ben made his way over to Bev, and Mike and Bill left Stan and Patty on their own, whispering quietly to each other.</p><p>Eddie knew that this was only the beginning — so much more to be done, after this perfect moment, the eight of them jammed into this tiny room. Richie had a long road of recovery ahead of himself, and Stan too: they had to return to their lives, pick up the pieces they left behind, and start again new — they had to begin to heal after four months in comas. For his part, Eddie honestly wasn’t even sure if he had a job anymore and also he was a fucking <em> witch </em> or something, and they were all going to need so much therapy for the rest of their lives but —</p><p>But —</p><p>They were here, in this hospital room. Eddie was lying in a hospital bed, curled around Richie like they were parentheses, and Stan was just across the room. He had scars across his wrists not unlike Eddie’s, pale white and gleaming in the fluorescent light, and Patty was knelt on the ground next to him, kissing his face. Bill was laughing at something Ben had said, and Bev was holding Ben’s hand. Mike was leaning back in his chair, looking up at them.</p><p>They were all here, and they made it.</p><p>“Mike,” said Richie. He squinted vaguely in his direction. “Mikey. Bro. Are you crying?”</p><p>Mike sniffed. “Maybe. Fuck off, Rich. Nobody look at me.”</p><p>“Wow,” said Ben, grinning into Bev’s hair. “I thought for sure I’d be the first to start crying.”</p><p>“I mean,” offered Richie, “if we’re gonna get into it, Eddie actually cried first.”</p><p>“Yeah, I sure fucking did, Rich. You wanna fight me about it?”</p><p>“Always.”</p><p>“Wait, when did Eddie cry?”</p><p>“Eddie, you cried?”</p><p>“Yes, I fucking cried — I raised two people from the dead, get off my dick.”</p><p>“Imma get on —”</p><p>“Beep beep, Rich!”</p><p>Bill had pulled out his phone. “Hey, Audra wants to FaceTime us, can everyone get up by the bed?”</p><p>“Wait, let me go wash my face off —”</p><p>“Is she going to come visit? Can she break into my house and bring me a pair of glasses?”</p><p>“I can’t believe, for all that planning, Eddie, you didn’t bring him a pair of glasses in your bag —”</p><p>“Audra, babe, Richie wants you to break into his house —”</p><p>Stan had wheeled himself up next to the bed. He looked so much older and exactly the same.</p><p>“Hey,” he said. “I think I had a dream about you.”</p><p>Eddie smiled. He ran a hand through Richie’s hair and said,  “Yeah, man. Me too.”</p><p><br/>
<br/>
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</p><p> </p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>When<br/>
you wake up<br/>
from death,<br/>
you will find yourself<br/>
in my arms<br/>
and<br/>
I will be<br/>
kissing you,<br/>
and<br/>
I<br/>
will be crying.<br/>
— Richard Brautigan, <em> If I Should Die Before You </em></p>
</blockquote>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>
  <span class="small"> - part titles are from an iain thomas quote that, when put together, reads: "i like to think that somewhere out there, on a planet exactly like ours, two people exactly like you and me made totally different choices and that, somewhere, we're still together. that's enough for me."<br/>- my extremely disused tumblr <a href="https://greatunironic.tumblr.com/">is here</a> for other stories, prompts, + snippets </span>
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        </blockquote></div></div>
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